A Brief History of Private Number Plates

Posted on 6th January 2012 in Automotive

Any person, who goes through the roads in the UK, is often more conscious of increase in popularity of Private Number Plates. However it is said that the Private Number Plates started dating back to 1903. Actually, the origins of these number plate’s dates back to 1681, when carts registered to get rent in London were instructed to display a number using a brass plate. But, number plates, as it is recognised at present, weren’t created before the arrival of the Motor Car Act of 1903. The Act made it necessary for motor vehicles to have a universal registration together with the display of the alphanumeric number plates, and thus number plate system was developed.

Though A1 wasn’t the earliest registration number to be launched in Britain, a local council member, Earl Russell, camped outside the office of local authority through the night to get this particular registration and has been since the very first holder of Private Number Plates. Another main landmark in the history of Private Number Plates emerged in 1920, after the Roads Act came into power. Based on this new law, an automobile can keep a registration number for its lifetime. Rather than the need to re-register in case, it was shifted out of its originating local authority. The system widened in 1932 to compensate to the growing amount of vehicles.

comments: 0 »

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

Comment

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>