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A.W. Lymn Number Plate Collection

21 Apr 2026

Luxury car collection outside a heritage building for A.W. Lymn plates

Plates mentioned

This Family Funeral Business May Own the Most Valuable Number Plate Collection in the United Kingdom There are collectors, and then there is A.W. Lymn. Most people encountering a silver Rolls-Royce hearse on a Nottinghamshire street would simply note the dignity of the vehicle and move on. Very few would clock the number plate and realise they were looking at one piece of what is almost certainly the most extraordinary private number plate collection assembled by any business in the United Kingdom. 214 registrations in total. 187 of them are number ones. To understand what that means in financial terms, consider this: the cheapest three-digit number one currently on the market will set you back around £80,000. A four-digit number one starts at approximately £9,000. Multiply that across a fleet where almost every vehicle bears a number one plate, and you begin to grasp the scale of what has been quietly built here over the past four decades. And then there are the additional 16 plates held privately by the family themselves, sitting outside the business collection entirely. A Family Business Over a Century in the Making A.W. Lymn was founded in 1907 by Arthur William Lymn, a furniture maker who gradually moved into coffin making and from there into funeral directing. Over one hundred and seventeen years later, the business remains entirely in family hands. Matthew Lymn Rose, a great-great-grandson of the founder, serves as Managing Director. His father Nigel is Chairman. His aunt Jackie is a director. His mother Penny, his sister Chloe, and his cousin Ben are all involved. It is a family enterprise in the most genuine sense of the phrase. From its base in Nottingham, the company now conducts around 3,000 funerals every year across 24 offices throughout Nottinghamshire and South Derbyshire. It has run Rolls-Royce motor hearses continuously since the transition away from horse-drawn carriages, a tradition that remains central to the business's identity today. How the Collection Began The story of the plates starts with Nigel Lymn Rose, Matthew's father, who caught the collecting bug in the late 1980s. The first acquisitions included

NLR 1

, Nigel's own initials, alongside a handful of others. Then, in what Matthew describes as a pivotal moment, six plates arrived together:

and

and

and

. These mirror pairs, where the original issue and its reversed counterpart are held together, became a signature of how Lymn approach their collecting.

2 GUW

followed shortly after as a seventh. From that point on, the number one plate became intrinsic to the Lymn identity. Almost every vehicle in the fleet bears one. Among the most significant plates in the collection is

XE 1

, an original 1920 London issue registration, held alongside its counterpart

1 XE

which was acquired at DVLA auction. A matched pair of that age and provenance, kept together rather than separated to the open market, represents exactly the kind of thoughtful, long-term collecting that defines what Lymn have built. Always Number One The plates are not simply a collection for collection's sake. At the heart of why A.W. Lymn pursue number ones so deliberately is something far more straightforward: they believe in delivering a number one service to every family they work with, and the registrations on their fleet are a quiet, considered expression of that commitment. It is a philosophy that has run through the business for over a century, and the plates give it a visible form. Each one is a piece of British registration history, issued decades ago and carefully preserved rather than passed from hand to hand through the open market. Alongside these originals sits the broader collection, which includes:

, GRO 5E,

, London 1953.

, London 1955.

, London 1920.

, London 1961.

, Middlesex 1960.

, Leeds 1960.

, Kent 1962.

, Kent 1963. Each one is a piece of British registration history, issued decades ago and carefully preserved rather than passed from hand to hand through the open market. Taken together, they span four decades of original county issues, from the early London allocations of the 1920s through to the early 1960s. What they have built, over four generations and more than thirty years of collecting, is a living archive attached to a working fleet. Every funeral conducted by A.W. Lymn is, in some small way, also a procession of British history, delivered with the care and dignity that has defined this family business since 1907. A sincere thank you to Matthew and the entire team at A.W. Lymn for their generosity in allowing us to visit, and for sharing the story behind both the fleet and the collection. It was a genuine privilege.