Personally Yours car registrations and private number plates, over 35 million available from only £199, all on certificate issued by Swansea.

Search UK Number Plates below

Mr.Brian Heaton explaining some of number plate early issues. UK Car Number Plate Information

All uk car number plates and cherished vehicle registration numbers are issued by number plates Swansea. Why buy one ? We have sold many numbers to customers who use the number and also keep the number on sale, this way you get the best of both worlds by way of investing and enjoying the number. Cherished number plates have historically been great investments (eg. 907 MDH in 1975 would have been valued at around £100, in 1985 around £800 and today's valuation would be £2000,

Mainland plates are black on white (front) and black on yellow (rear) sometimes with the addition of the European Union symbol. The font is a uniform size sans serif of various types, although colourful (and unfortunately illegal) designs can be seen springing up all over Britain.

They go as follows;
Year Letter, followed by 1, 2 or 3 numbers from 1-999 (excepting certain 'cherished' numbers which are held back for resale at astronomically high prices), followed by three letters, the second two of which denote the local vehicle licensing authority. Cars, lorries and buses are more often now registered at the discretion of either dealer or owner, and do not necessarily denote the home province of the vehicle. Pre-suffix registrations are now valued collectors' pieces as well as vanity accoutrements, and bus companies throughout Britain have imitated car owners by reregistering plenty of modern buses with classic marks.

Year letters were introduced in 1963 after the old system of 2 letters / 4 numbers (to 1934) followed by 3 letters / 3 numbers (and reversed haphazardly from 1960-61) was exhausted. Vehicles received a suffix letter after 3 letters / 3 numbers (example OYM 582A), and then proceeded through Y, omitting I, O, Q, U and Z. The date of first issue of the year letter moved from New Year's Day to August 1st from 1st August 1967 (when E changed to F), in an effort to forestall the yearly rush to buy newly-suffixed cars (which however migrated with it, to the ongoing despair of Britain's car dealers.) The series then reversed from August 1983, with the year letter becoming a prefix.

The current year prefix (from August 1, 1998) is S, but sick of this well-loved British tradition (and surely one of the few incentives left to buy today's overpriced and uninteresting new cars, the idea being to one-up your neighbours by flaunting newer-registered vehicles), the car manufacturing industry, their holidays cramped by the unusual August sales bulge, have pressured the number plates to end it. Only in Britain would you want to cancel a scheme that contributes to sales! Anyway, the current system is to be wrecked already, with the last August changeover being S-prefixes. T will begin on 1st March 1999, then U six months later, and V, W, X and Y at the same intervals until the new system begins. This has been confirmed as 'ABC 12DE', but no firm word as to which combinations will denote year, place of origin or individual vehicle. Where buses are concerned it will make allocating lists of matching numbers to buses nightmarish, but one must remember not a single RT-family bus had a matching plate (excepting SRT 126, which was a fluke - its donor STL was already registered DLU 126).

Local areas

Omissions on the grounds of obscenity don't count - that's the number plates's hang-up, not mine. It must be noted that this list approximates the ideal situation before 1974, after which much messing with the system was commenced, with local offices shutting and neighbouring ones taking on the issuance of their numbers (but not always). With the rise and rise of personalised registration numbers, their place of origin has become rapidly irrelevant, while order has evaporated entirely in some regions. With buses, no law says you have to register your vehicle with a mark according to where it will be working, thus with the location of manufacturers being increasingly distant from London, not to mention that of the operating companies, vehicles with plates from Scotland (the location of Alexander's' plant) and even the strange plates of Northern Ireland (home of Wrights) have proliferate.

Northern Ireland registrations

These are different again. The Current system is three letters and 1-4 numbers, 1-9999. (example RDZ 6130) Now that they are legal on mainland vehicles, they are highly prized as cheap semi-vanity plates or to reregister vehicles of uncertain age. The difference with these is they ascend upwards through the alphabet, and include the vowels banned on the mainland. A noteworthy exception was when County Fermanagh skipped from JIL to LIL, bypassing the potentially controversial KIL.