Number Plate Stories

Home for Chris Burrows is Orkney, one of a group of islands off the north coast of Scotland where she spent a happy childhood. Now married to an Englishman and living in England, Chris feels a yearning for her homeland. She has found a unique way of expressing these feelings, by having an Orkney number plate on her car. “I bought my first car in Orkney in the late 1960’s. It was a dark blue Vauxhall Viva with the registration number BS 7629. The letters BS were assigned to Orkney and as the population is so small, most of the cars there still carry BS numbers,” said Chris, “I was waiting for my new Mercedes SLK to be delivered, when my husband suggested that we find a personal plate for it. I didn’t want to have my name or initials but thought that it would be great to have BS 7629 again.”

Unfortunately for Chris, a call to the DVLA soon established that her old registration number no longer existed. “It might have ended up as a rusty heap on some forgotten corner of the island, or even been pushed over a cliff when the car became too old – a common way of disposing of cars on a remote island. We decided to start looking for a similar BS number. The DVLA offered to construct 7629 BS for me, but it wouldn’t be the same, I wanted a genuine Orkney number and Orkney never had to reverse the format because of having so few cars on the island, so a made up number just wouldn’t look right.”

Chris and her husband spent a whole winter searching for a suitable number while they waited for the Mercedes to be delivered. They eventually found one that was just four number below Chris’s original registration. “We thought BS 7625 was as near as we were going to get, so we bought it straight away. It’s been on my Mercedes ever since. I’ve grown quite attached to it already and imagine that I will keep this number for good.”

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