Why the 50p in your pocket could be worth £200
Next time you’re shoving some change into a parking meter, take a close look at the coins. One of them might be worth a lot more than its surface claims. If you come across a 50p piece with a picture of a Chinese pagoda on it, put it back in your pocket. If it’s in good nick a coin dealer will give you as much as £200 for it — 400 times its face value.
the design is pretty enough. the Kew Gardens pagoda, built by the 18th-century architect Sir William Chambers, is flanked by the dates 1759 (when Kew Gardens was founded) and 2009, when the coin was issued to celebrate the gardens’ 250th anniversary. And it was drawn by none other than the President of the Royal Academy, Christopher Le Brun.
But the reason the coin is so valuable has nothing to do with its looks, and everything to do with its rarity. Just 210,000 Kew Gardens coins were minted, which makes it a very limited edition. When you realise that there are just over a billion 50p pieces in circulation, you begin to see quite how uncommon the Kew Gardens ones are.
Only one in 300 of us has ever had one of the Kew Gardens coins in our pocket. And with coin collectors — or numismatists — snapping up the 50p pieces for their private collections, there are fewer and fewer of them in circulation, so their value rises all the time.
Not that the buying power of the 50p changes; whatever its design, it will still only get you 50p worth of chocolate in the corner shop. In fact, 50p coins are only legal tender for sums up to £10.
So, even if you presented 21 of the rare Kew coins, worth £4,200, to buy something on sale for £10.50, a shopkeeper would have the right to turn you down — although he’d be pretty foolish to do so.
‘While we’re urging everyone to check their change to see if they could have one of these exceptional coins in their pockets, we also want to encourage the nation to look more closely at all the coins we use every day,’ said Shane Bissett, director of commemorative coins at the Royal Mint.
‘they really are miniature works of art, worth looking out for, admiring and collecting — and keeping hold of them is a great way for us to build our own private art galleries.’
SO, WELCOME to the illogical, but deeply mathematical, world of coin collecting — which attracts complete obsessives, driven by rarity, beauty and oddity.
All 50p pieces have the seven sides in common, of course. All of them are made of cupronickel — three-quarters copper and onequarter nickel — and struck with a force of 100 tons on a coin press that can make 30,000 an hour. And, since the satisfyingly chunky 1969 original was replaced in 1997 with a smaller version, all of them weigh eight grams.
But the crucial fact for coin collectors is that, unlike other coins, there have been more than 58 commemorative designs on the reverse side of the 50p. there were 29 new ones — from a swimmer submerged in water to a horse and rider jumping over a fence — issued for the London 2012 Olympics alone. In total, the 2011 ‘Sporting Series’ amounted to 53 million 50p pieces.
But crucially all its designs were minted in varying numbers, which is why the second most valuable 50p is the Olympic coin with a diagram explaining that bane of football widows, the offside rule; 1,125,500 of those were minted. the third is the Olympic triathlon coin, with 1,163,500 minted. Numbers four and five in the most popular 50p list are also from the Olympic series (see box).
to make things more complicated, the Royal Mint, owned by the treasury, can take several years before it confirms the precise number of coins — or mintage — issued with a particular design. that means collectors will snap up newly-minted coins in the hope that the issue will be a small one.
But it isn’t just rarity that dictates high prices. Some designs are hoarded more than others simply because they strike a resonance with the public — the Beatrix Potter issues being a classic example.
Numbers six and seven in the most collectible 50p list are both from the Beatrix Potter set, starring Jemima Puddle-Duck and Squirrel Nutkin, released in 2016 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter’s birth.
Beatrix Potter is a particular favourite among coin collectors; just this year the Royal Mint has produced a commemorative silver 50p piece featuring Peter Rabbit on the reverse, costing £10.
Some 50p pieces are popular for other reasons, such as patriotism. take the 2005 50p minted to commemorate 250 years since the publication of the first english dictionary by Samuel Johnson. A whopping 17,600,000 of those were made but, because they were much treasured by collectors, they are in short supply.
On top of all this there’s the question of coin quality. ‘trying to find a good quality coin from 20 years ago is much more challenging than a recent issue, as coins become damaged over time and are ultimately removed from circulation,’ explains a spokesman for Change Checker, the online numismatists’ site.
How does the Royal Mint know which coins are popular with collectors? It’s all thanks to an eagle-eyed man at the Mint, in Llantrisant, South Wales.
HIS UNENVIABLE job, for several days at a stretch, is to examine 15,000 50p pieces, taken at random out of general public circulation. He must then calculate if there are fewer examples of a particular design than you would expect, given the number that have been minted.
even taking into account those coins dropped down the back of the sofa or under the driver’s seat, he can then work out which 50p pieces are being snapped up by collectors.
Kevin Clancy, director of the Royal Mint Museum, said: ‘We know some get lost or are taken abroad, but, if we see a drop of a particular coin in the surveys, we know it’s become popular.’
Since it was introduced there have been different commemorative designs for the 50p piece, covering everything from the UK’s accession to the european economic Community in 1973 to the 2010 centenary of Girlguiding UK. Huge events are commemorated on the 50p, like last year’s 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.
But why does the 50p in particular carry so many different designs? Simply because its larger size lends itself to them. the much smaller 20p piece, for example, has only had two different reverse designs since it was introduced in 1982, which explains why the most hotly sought-after 20p coin has nothing to do with its design and everything to do with a mistake — it doesn’t have a date on it.
By accident, 250,000 of the 136million 20p pieces minted in 2008-09 were undated. As a result, they can go for up to £100 — 500 times its face value. So just check that 20p before putting it in the meter as well.