A Brief History Of Registration Plates

If you are one of Britain’s 36 million road users, you may assume that registration plates have always been attached to motor vehicles, but that isn’t the case! The first cars to hit the British roads, in the 1890s, weren’t required to have number plates attached. In fact, the car registration system hadn’t even been invented yet. However, with the adoption of powered transportation becoming more and more popular, it meant that a method was needed to identify individual road users.

Dateless Plates

At the end of the Victorian era in 1903, the UK’s number plate history began. The Motor Car Act was introduced and it became law in the following year. The initial number plates were designed and it became compulsory for every car to display one. 

Plates from the early years were a simple combination of letters and numbers that were non-date specific. Some of these are highly sought after today with some straightforward registrations like 1 KH and EG 7 selling for thousands of pounds. These ‘dateless’ style plates remained in production until 1963.

Suffix Plates

The problem with the original system for registration plates was that the possible combination of numbers and letters soon ran out. With car and vehicle ownership on the rise, more plates were needed for vehicles than could be generated. This gave rise to the ‘Suffix style’ number plate and these were produced from 1963 to 1983. 

Suffix plates featured an additional letter at the end of each set of characters to signify a year. 

A = 1963

B = 1964

C = 1965

…and so on.

Authorities struggled to keep pace with the new system and in a world that was pre-technology, things like registering a new vehicle or running a police check was labour intensive and had to be managed locally at council level. Number plate history shows that this created an administrative nightmare which gave rise to the idea of a centralised service, and in 1974 the DVLA was born.

Prefix Plates

During the early 80s there again became a need for more unique vehicle identifiers than were available, and to release additional number plates the ‘Prefix system’ was devised. Starting in 1983, this format saw the letter used to identify the year on suffix plates moved from the end of the prefix number plate to the beginning. 

Prefix plates were formatted as a letter, 3 numbers, and 3 letters.

E.g: A123 FGH

In addition to identifying the year, the final two letters of the prefix plates indicated the area of registration. This style of number plate ran until 2001.

New Style Plates

The arrival of the new millennium saw the number plate system being revamped once again and much thought was given to the appropriate formatting of vehicle registrations. It was decided by the authorities that the area code would be moved to the beginning of the plate followed by a date identifier and 3 letters picked at random. As well as making number plates easier to read it opened up a huge amount of possibilities for creating new registrations.

Current style number plate formatting looks like this: JT18 HGF

The new format has been designed to allow for millions of number plate combinations which will ensure that the system lasts longer than previous styles. Calculations and projections indicate that this plate style should remain in place until around 2049 where it will then, too, become part of UK number plate history.