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Whenever I look at a handful of UK coins there’s always one coin that stands out most to me, and that’s the twenty pence piece. I have a bit of a soft spot for this particular coin, simply because for me, it was the first big change to UK coinage that occurred in my life.
The humble 20p coin tumbled into our pockets on the 9th June 1982, and was introduced, believe it or not, because there were concerns that the amount of loose change people had to carry about was getting too heavy! The thought process was that the twenty pence piece would reduce the number of ten pence pieces that had to be in circulation.
Like it’s bigger comrade the fifty pence, twenty pence coins are seven sided, and they are made of Cupro-nickel, in a ratio of 84% copper and 16% nickel.
One of the reasons I have such fond memories of this coin is that when they first went into circulation, our entire family decided that we would save up every twenty pence coin we got to keep for spending money on our next holiday. We used to keep them in a little metal tin money box that had a lager logo on it (Carlsberg I think it was), as these were a craze at the time. Sadly I forget exactly how much we saved up now…
On a sadder note though, the introduction of the twenty pence piece was also the beginning of the end for two other pieces of UK currency. Firstly, the half pence coin was removed from circulation in 1984, and then the one pound note followed in 1988, after it had become unnecessary thanks to the introduction of the one pound coin in 1983.
More recently the twenty pence coin made news headlines when a batch of new coins were issued in 2008 that did not have the year of issue inscribed upon them. This was a mistake and the Royal Mint put out a recall notice, apparently offering £50 for each coin returned. However, some more enterprising people who ended up with one of these mistake coins put them up on eBay for sale, and have made a quite tidy profit in the process, some going for £100-200 or even more!
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My favourite was/is the one pound coin. We used to call it a beer token (back when a pint of beer at the uni bar was a pound!).
Don’t forget at that time that 5, 10 and 50(?) pence pieces were significantly larger than they are now.
I’ve got some older ones tucked away to show Jonathan when he gets older.
I used to love that old style 50p that had the interlocking hands going all the way around it on the non-Queen side of the coin.
I have an old 10p in my old piggy bank. It’s actually one of the ones that says 2 Shillings on it, so presumably it was pre-decimal but could still be used.
In a similar vein, we managed to keep one of each of the current coins from 2008 to show Kara when she gets older. “This is what money looked like when you were born”
Oh yes what a time that was, I remember when the 20p coin came out and there was all sorts of silly news about it, people complaining that it was to easy to loose for example. I also started to collect them, they were a big hit.
When the £1 coin was introduced the big thing was the pound coin holder, do you remember those, plastic tubes with a spring in so that you could dispense your pound coins.
Pound coin holders! Yes, I remember those. Seems a ridiculous idea now, I mean, what made the pound coin so special to require a holder?
I personally had a holder of a slightly different style. It was basically a pentagon with five pound coin shaped holes, one on each side, that you could slide the coins into to keep them together. Effectively you replaced five small coins with one massive plastic one.