It lies south-west of the town centre, just south of the A40, the main road to Gloucester, and north of the district of Up Hatherley.
Much of the area consists of the Benhall (originally Benhall Farm) Estate, developed mainly in the late 1950s and early 1960s on land that had previously been farmland (mainly pasture), and takes its name from the farm that formerly stood there (at the site of the current Notgrove Close).
The district is divided in two by a stream with steep banks, surrounded by a narrow area of grass and woodland.
"Robert Burns Avenue" was named after the Scottish poet, after complaints that he was not among the poets with roads named after them in the older St Mark's estate (Tennyson, Byron, Shakespeare, etc.
Benhall Farm was one of the plains used by the WWII U.S. Army Services of Supply, European Theater of Operations as a staging site for trucks, tanks, jeeps, artillery and weather-resistant materiel during the Operation Bolero buildup in the British Isles prior to the Operation Overlord invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944.