Moneymaker
The teenager who designed thee new £1 coin
When Britain’s new, 12-sided £1 coin enters circulation this morning, leaving a trail of quaint pandemonium at vending machines and trolley parks in the process, many of us will study its intricacies. But for David Pearce, the schoolboy responsible for designing its tails’ side, that novelty wore off long ago.
“Honestly, I’m not too fussed about it all,” says Pearce. “I’m excited the day’s finally here, but I’ve got A-levels to focus on now. I’ve put this to the back of my mind a bit.”
Two and a half years ago, as a 15-year-old completing his GCSEs at Queen Mary’s Grammar School in Walsall, Pearce beat more than 6,000 other entrants – among them professional designers, artists, architects and historians – in a nationwide competition launched by the Royal Mint to find a suitable reverse side (the Queen, as ever, bagsied the other with a new portrait) for the oldest still-used currency in the world.
“It was one of my Design and Technology teachers who first heard about it,” Pearce recalls. “He had everyone in the younger years enter, but mentioned it to a few of us at GCSE level too. I thought it might be a good thing to have a go at.”
Their brief was scant. Entrants were told the coin would have 12 sides, like the old threepenny bit, and that it’d be bimetallic (the outside nickel-brass, the inside nickel-plated solid alloy), like the £2 coin. From there they were asked to create something which “unambiguously represents the UK”.
Pearce spent his evenings at home sketching ideas – heraldic symbols, iconic buildings, British institutions – and studied the tails patterns of the ‘‘round pound’’, which has featured everything from the Menai bridge to the royal coat of arms on its reverse since its introduction in 1983.
“I wanted to draw upon the past, but put a bit of a new take on it. I thought the floral symbols of each country best summed them up, so decided to weave the rose of England, the leek from Wales, the thistle from Scotland and Northern Ireland’s shamrock together inside the Crown, creating a properly United Kingdom,” he remembers. “I don’t normally do arty drawings, so it was actually really hard.”
Despite having weeks for the task, Pearce completed his drawing on the deadline day, sending his application off at 10pm, with two hours to spare. At the behest of his enterprising DT teachers, he had entered a few competitions before, but since he didn’t win, he forgot all about it.
Then, one spring morning in 2015, Pearce was pulled out of class by his headmaster, Tim Swain, to take a call in his office. It was George Osborne, the then chancellor of the exchequer. “I thought they must have the wrong person, that they’d mixed up the entries. I thought it’d be pretty embarrassing if I went to accept it and there’d been a mix-up” says Pearce, whose mother, Maria, also thought her son was joking when he told her – not least due to the £10,000 prize.
A trip to Number 11 Downing Street to meet the runners-up and a beaming Mr Osborne, who was holding a copy of his work, soon made it very real.
“We went to a state room and I heard more about the coin and he showed me how it was going to look.”
While the tail’s side of the coin released today is Pearce’s design (look close enough and you’ll even see a subtle DP embossed in one corner), his sketch was sharpened up by a couple of professionals. Their alterations were minimal, though: all the plants now stem from the same root, and the one pound denomination was moved to the bottom.
Among the thousands of entries, there were depictions of cups of tea, rainclouds, the London Eye and the Rolling Stones’ tongue and lips logo.
Astonishingly, two pupils from Queen Mary’s were chosen to visit Downing Street. Cody Gill, two years below Pearce at school, also made the six-strong shortlist. “It’s all thanks to our teachers. They foster design talent really well,” says Pearce, who studies DT, Maths and Geography at A-level, and hopes to study architecture at Cambridge – something his prize money will help with.
The exposure shouldn’t hurt, either. After all, the best that most young designers can hope for is an exhibition. But the Royal Mint will produce 1.5 billion copies of his work before the old coin ceases being legal tender in October. In doing so, his work will find its way into the pockets everyone he meets.
So will Pearce rush out to see his contribution to history this morning?
“I went to the Mint once to see them made, but I haven’t got one. I think I’ll just wait until I’m given one in change at the shops. My friends are more excited than me. It’s just something I did once, you know?”