Spaniards End lies behind the eponymous inn.
By the end of the 1600s houses can be found around a pond on North End Way - these formed a village called North End. By 1710 there were 10 people paying 19 quit rents for 18 houses and cottages, and nearly three acres, almost all taken from the heath, at ’over the heath or North End’.
Two of the 18 houses were recently built cottages at ’Parkgate’, later called Spaniard’s End. The only other building in the area was Mother Huff’s, an inn later called the Shakespeare’s Head, fronting Spaniard’s Road. The house, where Mother Huff claimed in 1728 to have been for 50 years, was recorded in 1680 and may have been the New inn marked on the road through Cane Wood (Kenwood) to Highgate c. 1672.
The name Spaniard’s End was only gradually applied in connection with the nearby inn. Only by the end of the nineteenth century was it named on maps as such.
In Spaniard’s End, Heath End House was occupied by Sir William Parry (1790-1855), the Arctic explorer, and from 1889 to 1912 by Canon Samuel Barnett (1844-1913), the social reformer, and his wife Dame Henrietta (1851-1936), founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb. In 1895 they lent the house, which they called St. Jude’s Cottage, to the painter James Whistler (1834-1903) and in 1903 they took over Erskine House for a convalescent home.
The whole estate was acquired by Sir Hall Caine - a novelist - who demolished Erskine House in 1923. From 1894 to 1908 the Elms was the home of Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, an art dealer. The house to the north was demolished between 1891 and 1913. A new house, called Mount Tyndale, was built in the 1920s and occupied in 1938 by Viscount Knollys.
There was a larger house called the Firs. This was divided in the 1950s into three houses called the White House, the Chantry, and Casa Maria, the third being formed from the billiard room. The outbuildings were converted into other dwellings. Heath End House survived under the name Evergreen Hill, next to a wing of the old Erskine House. The Elms housed St. Columba’s hospital from 1957 and was then owned, but rarely inhabited, by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress. In 1981 it was sold for a large sum to a sheikh of the United Arab Emirates but it remained unoccupied and in 1987 was sold to developers.
