UK Number Plate Area and Geographical Codes

It's always nice to be an authority on a historical commodity. And one of the first steps toward becoming an authority on UK number plates, is to learn about their composition over the years.

In the realm of UK number plates, there's always been an area code or geographical identifier incorporated into the registrations. However, the positioning of the code within the selection of characters has evolved over the years. To summarise in an easily digestible form, we made some images to represent the four main reg formats of dateless, suffix, prefix and new/current-style, with colour-coded bands to denote the function of the different character portions. The images appear below, and you can see where each format of plate has housed its area/geo code.

We've colour-coded the features of the different number plate formats below. Here's your key...

• Year identifier.
• Random letters.
• Random numbers.
• Geo identifier.

Dateless

Dateless number plates were standard from 1903 to the end of 1962. They can feature as few as two characters, and may appear with either number(s) first or letter(s) first. Dateless plates have no year indicator and are treasured as both a historical landmark and a personalisation medium.

Suffix

Suffix number plates were standard from the start of 1963 until the arrival of prefix plates in 1983. Suffix registrations always begin with a three-letter block, incorporating an area code, and end with an A-Z coded indication of the year. The numbers in between vary from a single digit up to three.

Prefix

Prefix number plates are, in terms of format, a mirror-image of the suffix system. The A-Z year code starts the registration, and is followed by a block of one to three random digits. Three letters, including the area code, conclude the composition. Prefix plates were current from 1983 to 2001.

New-Style

Current-style or New-style number plates debuted in 2001, and heavily standardised the format, settling on a rigid seven characters. That's two letters representing the area (and originally the local DVLA office) of issue, then two numbers representing the year, and finally, three random letters.

ADDITIONAL INFO FOR DATELESS PLATES

However, there's some extra information relating to the dateless format, with specific regard to this page. The example image shows a dateless plate with three letters and three numbers. Of the three letters, only the latter two comprise the area code. The other letter is a random serial addition, and was used purely to expand the volume of possible registrations.

But when the dateless plate series started in the early part of the 20th century, the letter portion contained just one or two characters, so the the whole of the letter portion was the area code. This applied from 1903 until (in England) 1932. Dateless plates always contained one letter block, and one number block - albeit that a "block" could comprise just one character, up to as many as four. And in the first half of the twentieth century, the letter block always came first.

But beginning in 1953, a lack of available new registrations led the various issuing offices to reverse the format, so that the numbers now came first, and the letters followed.

If you bear that in mind, along with the information provided by the images, you should be ready to start identifying the regions for old registrations. You now know where to look for the area codes within the various plate formats. All you need is a key to which area code goes with which area. Here we go...

The codes in this first table span the period from 1903 to 2001, at which point they were replaced by the new codes that came with the current system. Although it might seem that the logical way to allocate codes to regions would be to correlate the first letter of the code with the first letter of the region, city or town, there may have been confusion when multiple regions shared a first letter. So it was decided that the codes should be allocated alphabetically, but with reference to the population size of each area. The famous "A 1" registration from the very earliest phase of plate allocation, signified London. London had the highest population volume, so it was awarded the letter "A".

You'll also notice that plates containing the letters "I" or "Z" were dedicated to regions in Ireland. Neither letter was permissible within UK mainland registrations for dateless, suffix or prefix registrations.

The second table applies to new-style / current-style registrations only, and covers the period forward from 2001. Officially, the new area codes in this second table are known as the "Memory Tag". But they serve a similar purpose to the old area codes, and we've thus labelled them as geo codes. The issuing DVLA office listing applies only up until the local offices closed, between October and December 2013. After that, all registrations were issued from the main DVLA office in Swansea. However, the Memory Tag is still in use, and per region, registrations are still coded as if the local offices still existed.