Number Plates News

Villa Boss Plate is Not on the Transfer List

03 June 2009

Rumours that former Aston Villa manager, John Gregory, had sold his cherished V1 LLA plate, have been discounted as nonsense.

John said that he loves his registration and has no plans whatsoever to sell it, despite stories that he had been offered half a million pounds for the ultimate 'Villa' plate.

The 55-year-old ex-Villa boss paid a total of more than £40,000 to secure the number back in 2000 and insists, “I am very proud of the plate it means a lot to me.”

Numbers such as V1 LLA, are extremely rare: In the DVLA approved typeface, '1' and '0' are exactly the same characters as the capitals 'I' and 'O' respectively and are, therefore, the only letters that can be perfectly represented by numbers. So, V1 LLA looks, to all intents and purposes, like VI LLA. Of course, there must be a space between the '1' and the first 'L' in order to conform to the strict regulations governing the display of vehicle registrations.

As the UK's largest supplier of quality registrations, Regtransfers.co.uk, currently holds many of these perfectly formed examples, such as N1 ALL (NIALL), CEC 1L (CECIL) and V1 OLA (VIOLA).

You may be interested to read our fascinating feature showing how numbers can be substituted for letters in the fictional language of PlateSpeak.