THE NUMBER plate has been around for many years. The first country to introduce it was France with the passing of the Paris Police Ordinance on August 14, 1893. Other European countries started to follow suit, with the Netherlands becoming the first country to introduce a nationally registered licence plate in 1898, naming it a ‘driving permit’. Eventually, the UK also adopted the number plate using index marks of one or two letters. These were issued to various licensing authorities in 1903 when most powers that be allotted registrations starting at 1. It is believed that the first ever UK registration was DY1 from Hastings, Kent, registered on November 23, 1903. Three letters/three number series were subsequently introduced in 1932. All marks were allocated by the mid-1950s, and annotations issued by certain authorities were reserved with letters following numbers.
Some continued to issue ‘forward’ marks (numbers following letters) until the mid-1960s.
August 1, 1983, saw the introduction of a ‘prefix’ system using a single letter to show the year of first registration with an ‘A’ prefix. This method identified the age of the car with the first letter of the registration, which changed every August. The second and third numbers on the plate were random, with two of the last three letters denoting the registration area.