In 1584 the estate was managed as one farm, called Clitterhouse, consisting of 118 acres of arable and pasture and 80 acres of wood. From the 1550s local farming had switched from wood to hay to supply London’s increasing horse population

By the 1770s the farmhouse was a large timber-framed building of two storeys, with three gables and a jettied first storey. It occupied one side of a courtyard, on the other sides of which were weatherboarded barns of the standard Middlesex type, with steeply pitched roofs, and stables. Alterations were carried out after 1794 and by 1838 another farmhouse had been built on the site. The 19th-century building was converted into flats in the 1970s.

The estate was diminished by the encroachments of the Midland Railway's Cricklewood carriage-sidings in 1868.

From 1876 - 1915 the Brent Gas Works was built on Clitterhouse land. Clitterhouse became a dairy farm and was rebuilt around this time. Land was sold for a sewage works, and Hendon fever hospital (1890-1929). The southern part of the farm became the Beatty School of Flying and was Handley Page Aerodrome and factory (in Claremont Road) 1917. Here experimental warplanes were tested and commercial flights went to the continent in the 1920s. In 1929 the Aerodrome was forced to close and it became Laing’s “Golders Green Estate”. Shortly after 1926 Hampstead FC rented some of the land from Hendon UD finishing Clitterhouse as a farm and the rest of the land became a public open space.