Page 2 - Froghall Drive Our Story

Frog Hall Drive - or Froghall Drive?

Introduction by Chris French

The council oddly uses both variants on the name boards at the entrance to the Drive.

Which is the correct spelling??

The premise is that there was a house, in a marshy area near where the The Three Frogs pub is
now, on the main road - called Frog Hall. The area around it was called Froghall Green (and still is -
though successive maps show it further east or west and sometime north or south of the main
road!). This house was eventually demolished. Meanwhile, there is a substantial house at the end of
the drive, south of the main road. Its name at the time of its construction is not yet known. After
being called Waterloo Lodge for many years, since the 1850s, then Frog Hall and then briefly
Buzzacott House, this house was finally renamed Frog Hall. The name of the drive then became Frog
Hall Drive. (Why the pub is called the Three Frogs has yet to be discovered).

Froghall Drive and Frog Hall

The history of Frog Hall Drive and its houses are of course dominated by the history of Frog Hall. I
believe that our house (No. 19) was built in 1955, but the fact that 10 different people owned Frog
Hall in the last 100 years means there is MUCH more information available about its history. I am

lucky that Les Roland at No. 40 (see below) has already done a great deal of research and obtained
many original documents, including an interesting set of photos of the drive, from 1954. He kindly
lent all this to me for several weeks and from these, and my results from much time Googling, I
have produced a history of Frog Hall and the Drive including photos, maps and documents relating
to changes of ownership in the period studied.

Maps

I had a couple of old paper Ordnance Survey maps which include Frog Hall Drive and I then started
searching out others online. So far I have a collection going back a couple of hundred years - I have
identified the key changes as we go further and further back. When I circulated this to other
residents of the drive I had at least a dozen expressions of interest and two great sources of more

detailed information (see below).