Personalised Number Plate Information

Number plates were officially introduced in 1903 with the A 1 series. These private plates started at A 1 and ended at YY 9988 and was in use until 1932. The first letter was used to identify the location in which the license plate was initially registered. For example, A indicated that the number plate was registered in London.

It's important to remember that the date on a car's number plate, may not accurately describe the date the car itself was produced. This is because it only tells us when the vehicle was registered and given a plate. This means that a car could be produced in one area and registered in another a few years later so you can't always rely on the number plate date. Some manufacturers stored their cars for a few years before registering them, which caused complications as they appeared new, but were in fact not.' G The first series of number plates were issued in 1903 and ran until 1932, using the series A 1 to YY 9999. The letter or pair of letters indicated the local authority in whose area the vehicle was registered, for example A - London, B - Lancashire, C - West Riding of Yorkshire. In England and Wales the letter codes were initially allocated in order of population size (by the 1901 census) whilst Scotland and Ireland had their own sequences incorporating the letters S and I respectively, which were allocated alphabetically: IA = Antrim, IB = Armagh, etc. When a licensing authority reached 9999, it was allocated another two letter mark, but there was no pattern to these subsequent allocations as they were allocated on a first come first served basis. There are three interesting anomalies where a zero has been issued - The Lord Provost of Edinburgh has S 0 and his Glasgow counterpart has G 0 while the official car of the Lord Provost of Aberdeen has RG 0. In addition the Lord Mayor of London has the registration LB 0."

There is unlikely to ever be a time when the number of personalised registrations comes close to the number of standard registrations on the road. This maintains the exclusivity of owning a personalised plate.

For example, the amount of money raised by the DVLA through the sale of personalised number plates more than doubled over three years, reaching over £162 million in the 2017/18 financial year.

The A 1 series of plates, introduced in 1093, began to run out of available numbers by 1932. This meant a new scheme needed to be developed in order for more numbers to be created. This was the AAA 1 series, which went from AAA 1 all the way to YYY 999. This allowed for many more plates to be created. At this point, it was decided the letters I, Q and Z should be removed from the series as they were too easily confused with other letters.

As mentioned, you can also work out the general area a car came from through the first two letters of the registration plate. The first letter represents a region. For example, London is represented by L, Yorkshire is identified by Y. The next letter represents the local DVLA office, to help better pinpoint its registration area."