I wonder if it's done to cope with homes that have had carpets fitted so thick that they interfere with using sockets placed in skirting-boards!

You know the American 3 pin socket. On another forum there has been a long discussion of which is the correct way up to fit them. It makes more of a difference for them as the plug/socket combination is at best rather wobbly apparently.

It stops you using one of those cuboid socket-doublers where there's one socket on top and another on the rear face.

You can't use the top one as the cord fouls the wall, and if you use the rear one, the top one becomes unusable.

Perhaps that's the idea.

Be careful, it may well be a plug with a power supply built in. I have never seen a standard 13 amp plug where the cable does not come out the bottom.

Peter

It s sounds like you have a non conforming plug.

Counterfeits and non-standard plugsEdit

Plugs which do not meet BS 1363 often find their way into the UK. Some of these are legal in the country they are manufactured in, but do not meet BS 1363 – these can be brought into the UK by unsuspecting travellers, or people purchasing electrical goods online. They can also be purchased through many UK electrical component distributors. There are also counterfeit plugs which appear to meet the standards (and are marked as such) but do not in fact comply. Legislation^[18] was introduced, with the last revision in 1994, to require plugs sold to meet the technical standard. Counterfeit products are regularly seized when found, to enforce the safety standards and to protect the approval marks and trademarks of imitated manufacturers.^[61] The pressure group PlugSafe^[62] reported in March 2014 that since August 2011 "thousands" of listings of products including illegal plugs had been removed from the UK sections of the websites eBay and Amazon Marketplace. The UK Electrical Safety Council expressed shock at the magnitude of the problem and published a video^[63] showing a plug exploding due to a counterfeit BS 1362 fuse. The Institution of Engineering and Technology also published information on the extent of the problem with on-line retailers, many advertising replacement cord sets, mobile device chargers, and travel adaptors fraudulently marked BS 1363, and mentioning the same sites.^[64]

^David