The origin of the name New Lodge Road is far from simple. It seems that the road was named after a house, or a small group of houses, called The Lodge, even though the location of the houses in question was at some distance from New Lodge Road as defined nowadays. On a 1791 map of Belfast, drawn by James Williamson, there are three houses close to each other in the area between Mount Collier and Oldpark, each of them marked as 'The Lodge'. The respective owners are named as Mr. G. Joy, Mr. H. Joy and Mr. Holmes.
On Williamson's map, Lodge Road approached these houses going NW, then N, from the town centre. Cross Lane approached the house going WNW from the docks. This was later improved and renamed New Lodge Road c. 1830. The upper half of this road (west of Antrim Road) was renamed Cliftonville Road in the mid-19th century. What remains is the lower half (east of Antrim Road), which explains why the modern New Lodge Road no longer extends as far as the former location of The Lodge. By the mid-19th century there was a proliferation of the element 'lodge' in the names of houses in this area: within the space of half a mile were The Lodge, Clifton Lodge and Easton Lodge, all on New Lodge Road (later Cliftonville Road); The Lodge (2), Old Lodge House and Vernant Lodge on Oldpark Road; Lodge Cottage located between these two groups; and Tudor Lodge on Crumlin Road. It is the first group of three that seem to account for the naming of New Lodge Road.
Although there is a neighbourhood now often referred to as 'New Lodge', the word ‘new’ originally applied to the road and not to the house name, as far as we are able to ascertain (i.e. there was no house called "New Lodge"). This has a bearing on the Irish version of the name and makes a good case for officially adopting Bóthar Úr an Lóiste. However, a pragmatist would have to acknowledge that there is little chance of this gaining currency, as the form Bóthar an Lóiste Úir is already well established.
James Williamson map of Belfast (1791) at National Museums NI