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Built in early 1852 as a farm house on 50 acres by William Brittan, the central gable and the Right hand buttressed side of the house was the original homestead.

Known as Englefield Lodge, the design of the house, although without any written sources, can reasonably be attributed to Brittan's brother-in-law Charles Edward Fooks (1829–1907) Architect, Surveyor, Civil Engineer and Secretary of the Land Board.

With three bedrooms and one bathroom, the 280 square metre house is now situated on a 1,624 square metre section on the eastern side of Fitzgerald Avenue, close the intersection with Kilmore Street and Avonside Drive.

William Guise Brittan (1807–76), was the Commissioner of Crown Lands and Publisher of The Canterbury Standard. His first home (1851) was situated at the Clarendon (Southeast) corner of Worcester Street and Oxford Terrace.

Brittan's son the Reverend Frederick George Brittan (1848-1945) was the last survivor of the first four ships emigrants, William's great-great grandson was Captain Charles Hazlitt Upham VC and Bar (1908–1994).

Englefield was substantially remodeled and enlarged in 1864. Those renovations can reasonably be attributed to the Architect Benjamin Mountfort (1825-1898) who lies next to Brittan in the Avonside church cemetery. Mountfort's nearby Gloucester Street house (demolished) and the alterations to the 1856 Middleton Grange at Riccarton indicate strong similarity of design elements. Brittan then sold the house, with 3 acres, to John Aikman for ?2,000 in that same year.

In 1866 Englefield passed to William Thomas Locke Travers (1819-1903), a Lawyer, Magistrate, Politician, Explorer, Naturalist and Photographer. The top Right image is Travers photographed in the garden, with his wife and daughter.

Travers sold the house in 1872 for ?3,000 to Edward Cephas John Stevens (1837-1915), a Real Estate Agent, Cricketer and Chairman of the Board of The Press newspaper. Travers kept the house for 50 years until his death in 1922.

After a five year ownership by the Architect John G Collins it became the home of E B Rawlings until 1946, when the house was sold to a Mrs M Saunders, who remarried into to the Righton family, who had a substantial interest in Christchurch cinemas. Mrs Righton bequeathed Englefield to the Salvation Army, who sold it to the current owners Mr and Mrs R. H. Ryman in 1972.

The earliest references to Englefield Lodge both occur in 1852, the first indicates that Brittan nominated the house as his domicile when enrolling three of his sons at Christ's College and the second is a description of the property from the Lyttelton Times of the 17th of April in that year.

"A neat wire fence fronts the road for a short distance, and is succeeded by a row of healthy looking hawthorn and furze plants on the top of the bank. The kitchen garden on the slope between the buildings and the road displays an abundance of vegetables and fruit trees of many kinds, besides a few willows and wattles. All the vegetables have succeeded to perfection here; there could not be finer potatoes, cabbages, turnips, onions, carrots, and parsnips; celery also flourishes. Peas and beans of several kinds were equally productive in their season.

A substantial cob house is being erected in the rear of the temporary hut, covered with rushes, which has afforded the first year's shelter to the farming man. Well-stocked piggeries and fowl house, a milking shed, and two ricks, stand in the neighbourhood.

Beside the kitchen garden, about twenty-three acres have been cropped on this farm. The soil is a light sandy loam, easily worked with two horses, now that the tutu roots have been extracted. I am told that this operation swelled the cost of tilling, in the first year, to ?10 or ?12 per acre; which is reckoned to have produced from twenty-eight to thirty bushels per acre; oats, barley, and potatoes afforded a much larger crop in proportion. The quality of all the crops is remarkably good, and as the land is now thoroughly cleansed, the yield, may be expected to augment next harvest."

Updated 16 October, 2008

The Homosexual Law Reform Act, signed by the governor-general on 11 July 1986 and coming into effect on 8 August that year, decriminalised sexual relations between men aged 16 and over. No longer would men having consensual sex with each other be liable to prosecution and a term of imprisonment. Sex between women was not illegal, but many lesbians suffered the same social discrimination as gay men and were staunch supporters of the reform movement.

The campaign to reform the law moved beyond the gay community to wider issues of human rights and discrimination. Extreme viewpoints ensured a lengthy and passionate debate. The outcome would mean that gays and lesbians could be out and about, or the New Zealand family would crumble and AIDS would spread through the community.