Long Lane, known as such by 1719, may have been called Ferrours Lane in medieval times. Roughly half way along its route is Squires Lane, which runs from the manor house to the High Road, the traditional division between East Finchley and Church End.

Behind the large houses which fronted Ballards Lane on the west, Squires Lane, and Long Lane was Claigmar Vineyards, started in 1874 by Peter Edmund Kay. By the 1890s the vinery’s 161 greenhouses were producing "100 tons each of grapes and tomatoes and 240,000 cucumbers a year".

In 1903 Finchley Electric Light Co. opened a generating station on the Kay’s site which was purchased by Finchley Council two years later and then in 1955 by the Eastern Electricity Board. Sir Charles Redvers-Westlake, who was engineer at the works between 1935 - 1948, was later responsible for the building what was then called the Owen Falls dam, Uganda.