Polam Hall

In 1642 the Turner family sold two pieces of land totalling about five acres to John Theobalds, who combined them into an estate with a field he owned called Polam and gave it the name Polam Hill (although it was also known as Glasensikes). The Warwicke family acquired this estate and sold it on to a local surgeon, Robert Hylton. A lawyer, Lawrence Brockett, bought and conveyed it to the Wensley family in 1728. James Allan, esq, bought it from them in 1754. It passed from him to the Lambton family and then to Harrington Lee, a Darlington merchant, who built a house, Polam Hall, in 1794 and lived there with his family for 27 years. Upon his death in 1824 the family sold the Polam Hill estate…

'Polam Hall' was sold to William and Robert Thompson, who leased it to the Procter sisters for use as a Quaker ladies’ finishing school. Jane Proctor had founded her first school in Selby which had lasted for twenty years. She founded "Selby School" in 1848 as a boarding school for girls at Number 11 Townhouse, in Houndgate helped by her sisters Elizabeth and Barbara. Polam Hall's owners (the Thompsons) went into liquidation in 1878, and one of their largest creditors, Quaker M.P. Arthur Pease, became Polam's new owner. In 2004, boys were introduced to the school for the first time when the sixth form became coeducational. Previously, some boys from the nearby boys' independent school…