The cathedral city of Durham is 10 mi (16 km) away and offers quite a contrast to the former pit villages in the area of Annfield Plain.

"Anfield", as the name was originally appears to derive from "the fields of An", referring to a man who lived before the Norman Conquest.

The "Plain" part of the name was originally "Plane" and appears to refer originally not to the plateau on which the village stands but to the inclined plane on the Stanhope and Tyne Railway of 1834 (now the basis of the eastern end of the C2C cycle route passing through Annfield Plain, from neighbouring Greencroft through to Stanley).

The earliest hard evidence of habitation in the area comes from the 16th century, when the main economic activity was sheep farming.

In the 19th century Annfield Plain was the scene of a murder, when a man named William Thompson killed his wife.

While there is some light industry (mostly at nearby Greencroft Industrial Park), most of Annfield Plain is made up of housing, village shops, a working man's club and two remaining pubs (Coach and Horses, and the Queen's Head – the Smugglers Arms closed in the 1990s and the Plainsman ceased trading and was demolished in 2009).

The original Annfield Plain co-operative store was dismantled and rebuilt at the nearby Beamish Open Air Museum in the late 1980s.

The village is part of the North Durham parliamentary constituency, which as of 2005 is represented in parliament by Kevan Jones (Labour).