Category: Coins

At first glance, this £1 note might look like a slightly unfamiliar piece of British currency.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll see that it was issued not by the Bank of England but by the States of Guernsey.

Guernsey has a long tradition of issuing its own notes and coins, with its currency maintained at parity with sterling. While Guernsey currency is intended for use within the Bailiwick rather than as legal tender throughout the UK, the familiar dimensions and appearance of the coins in particular mean that examples can sometimes find their way into everyday circulation elsewhere.

That makes Guernsey money an interesting little collecting area in its own right.

Michael tells us that notes and coins in particularly good or near-uncirculated condition will often sell for considerably more than their face value, with older issues tending to become more desirable once they have been replaced.

The note pictured is a States of Guernsey £1 note featuring Daniel De Lisle Brock, Bailiff of Guernsey from 1762 to 1842, alongside an image of the Royal Court in St Peter Port.

And while its printed value may be just £1, this particular example is currently available at Charing Cross Market for £4 — a nice illustration of how even relatively modern currency can become something rather more interesting once it enters the world of collecting.

Before the colour, before the plastic, and long before security holograms, there was the White Fiver. Issued from the late 18th century until 1957, it was one of the longest-running banknote designs in British history, and certainly among the most iconic.

The note shown here dates from 1945 and features elegant copperplate script promising to pay the bearer five pounds. The engraved Britannia in the top corner is the only visual decoration, but the bold Five in gothic type leaves no doubt about its value.

It was a serious note, both in function and in feel. Five pounds in the 1940s could buy a week’s holiday, a decent suit, or 120 pints of beer. For most people, it was not something you’d carry daily.

Collectors today look for condition, signatures, and specific issues from wartime or early print runs. Many were cancelled or destroyed when the new blue fiver was introduced in 1957, a note that brought colour printing and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II to the forefront. That modern design looked forward. The White Fiver looked back.

What it lacked in flair, it made up for in weight, confidence and a kind of no-nonsense authority that feels far removed from today’s polymer currency.

At first glance, a 100 million mark banknote sounds like unimaginable wealth. In Germany in 1923, it was closer to a symptom.

This Reichsbanknote belongs to one of the most notorious episodes in modern economic history: the Weimar hyperinflation. After the First World War, Germany was under enormous financial strain, but the crisis accelerated sharply in 1923 after French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr. The German government supported passive resistance by printing more money, and the mark’s value collapsed at terrifying speed.

By the autumn, prices were rising so quickly that money could lose value between being earned and being spent. Banknotes climbed from thousands to millions, billions and eventually trillions. In November 1923, the Rentenmark was introduced to restore confidence, with one new Rentenmark equal to one trillion paper marks.

What makes this note especially interesting is the reverse. Once near-worthless as currency, the blank back became useful real estate for politics. Here it has been overprinted with a message from the right-wing Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or German National People’s Party, using economic crisis as campaign material.

So this is more than inflation-era paper money. It is money after money stopped working: a banknote turned leaflet, a financial object turned political object, and a small survivor from a moment when value itself seemed to vanish.

A small coin with a rather big story attached, this 1933 Indian half anna has survived not only as a coin, but still mounted in its original Free Kindergarten Appeal card cover.

The card’s triangular design, with its English and German wording, suggests a charitable fundraising piece connected with British India, seemingly created to support children below compulsory school age. Given that the coin itself is almost a century old, the survival of the complete item feels especially unlikely. Coins are handled, spent, sorted, stored, lost and forgotten. Card mounts are even more vulnerable. Together, they make a modest but memorable little piece of social history.

The coin itself is a 1933 half anna, a low-value denomination from British India. In mint uncirculated condition, the coin alone might only be worth around £2.50, which is part of what makes this object so interesting. Its appeal is not really about precious metal or rarity in the usual numismatic sense. It is about context.

Pinned into a printed appeal card, it becomes something more human: a reminder of charity, childhood, empire, education and everyday giving.

There are collectables that tell you exactly what they are. And then there are pieces like this, which quietly refuse to explain themselves.

At first glance, this small grouping of coins looks like a collector’s mishap. Three French bronze coins – two 10 centimes (1854 and 1856) and a 5 centimes (1853) – sit alongside two Victorian silver pieces, including a threepence dated 1868. All have been carefully drilled and bound together with silk thread. To a purist, it’s a minor tragedy. To a collector of stories, it’s something far more interesting.

The French coins bear the profile of Napoleon III, with the imperial eagle on the reverse – a symbol carried atop the standards of French regiments. During his reign, France stood alongside Britain in the Crimean War, a detail that quietly links these otherwise disparate coins.

So why were they joined?

Perhaps this was a keepsake from a young aristocrat returning from a Grand Tour, gathering small tokens of experience along the way. Or maybe it was assembled by a soldier, threading together coins picked up during a campaign, each one marking a place, a moment, or a memory.

We may never know. But that uncertainty is part of the appeal. Despite their alteration, or perhaps because of it, these coins have remained together for well over a century – a small, handmade object that feels less like currency and more like a personal relic.

At first glance, these small, uneven silver coins might be easy to pass over. Yet pieces like these, struck in the late 13th century, carry the quiet weight of an age defined by travel, trade, conflict and belief. Both are high-grade silver deniers, each bearing a prominent cross on the reverse, a design so common that coins like these are often loosely grouped under the catch-all label of “Crusader coinage”.

Their condition tells part of the story. Notice the clipping around the edges, a clear sign they circulated widely and were traded for their silver value rather than cherished as objects. These were working coins, handled daily, cut down when silver was scarce, and passed from hand to hand across borders.

The coin on the left was minted in Greece under Isabella of Villehardouin, Princess of Achaea, around 1297 to 1301. Her rule belongs to the complex world of the Latin states formed after the Fourth Crusade, when Western powers carved out territories in former Byzantine lands. The coin on the right, struck in Spain during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile, dates to around 1200 and was found in the Thames, not far from Charing Cross itself, a reminder of how far medieval money could travel.

To evoke the period, a painted curved wooden panel has been included alongside the coins, showing armoured figures in motion. It is a fitting backdrop for objects that sit at the intersection of commerce, crusade and everyday medieval life.

Tucked inside an old leather wallet, two Bank of England ten shilling notes have resurfaced after roughly sixty years in hiding. Folded away in the stamp compartment, they were almost certainly someone’s long-forgotten emergency stash – the sort of quiet time capsule every collector secretly hopes to stumble across.

Collectors tend to agree on one thing: resist the urge to press, iron, or otherwise “improve” banknotes. More harm is caused by over-enthusiastic restoration attempts than by decades of natural ageing. Heavy folds and creases will often relax on their own when a note is stored in a proper archival sleeve. The raised elements of the design are surprisingly fragile and can be flattened beyond repair by heat or heavy pressure.

Plenty of homemade remedies have been tried over the years. Leaving notes in a book can tame the worst curls, while the old “steam-in-a-towel” method may initially make a note look crisper. But under scrutiny, the loss of embossing, softening of detail, and subtle colour changes are easy to spot. In the long term, such treatments can do more harm than good, especially to collectors who value originality over attempts to recover their original state.

For genuinely valuable notes, professional conservation is the only safe route, much like with stamps or important folded coins. But for discoveries like these – lightly handled, honestly aged, and appealing in their untouched state – “as found” remains the gold standard.

First impression? A hefty piece of silver bearing the date 1780 and a Latin edge inscription – a familiar sight in countless collections around the world.

This is the Maria Theresa Thaler, first minted in Austria between 1740 and 1780. It became the trusted silver currency of the Holy Roman Empire and its dominions, eventually rising to global trade coin status.

After Maria Theresa’s death in 1780, the date on the coin froze in time – and yet production never stopped. It’s estimated that by 2000, over 389 million pieces had been struck. That number’s still climbing today, with the Vienna Mint still producing them.

And it’s not just Austria. Sixteen different mints across Europe have churned them out over the centuries – including Birmingham (around1850) and even London’s Royal Mint, which produced them right up to 1975.
What’s less well known is how far the Thaler travelled. For over a century, it was the preferred trade currency across large parts of Africa and the Middle East. In Ethiopia, it was accepted as legal tender well into the 20th century, and in the Arabian Peninsula, it was prized not just for its silver but for its consistent weight and trusted purity. Local jewellery was even crafted from hoarded Thalers – a coin worn as much as it was spent.

With such volume, a standard 1780-dated coin holds bullion value – that’s about £20 in today’s silver. Even mint examples rarely exceed £30. But if you stumble across a pre-1780 original? That’s a different matter – potentially worth around £700.

You might need to sort through a few hundred million to find one… or just ask your friendly dealer at Charing Cross Market.

Among the many coins that stir interest from collectors across the globe, few Australian pieces carry as much historical and visual appeal as the 1927 and 1945 florins.

First up: a commemorative beauty. This 1927 florin was issued to mark the opening of Parliament House in Canberra, and it shows. Ornate scrollwork, twin sceptres, and an engraving of the building itself make it one of the most striking Commonwealth coins of its era. Two million were released into circulation, so most examples today are affordable and hover just above the silver spot price, unless they’re in pristine mint state. Only 400 proof versions were produced, and these command serious respect and around £4,000 at auction.

The second coin, dated 1945, shows King George VI on the obverse and the classic Australian arms reverse, complete with kangaroo, emu, and coat of arms. Minted in Melbourne, it’s a war-era issue still found in relatively good condition due to limited circulation. All Australian florins were struck in Melbourne except one rare outlier in 1854, minted in San Francisco for colonial trade.

It’s worth noting that many in the precious metals trade have moved away from calling these items “scrap” when discussing their melt value. The preferred term today is “spot”, acknowledging that while the metal forms the basis of value, the historical and collector interest often outweighs any thought of melting them down.

In an era when Roman fortunes were as uncertain as the purity of their coinage, the silver debased antoninianus from the reign of Emperor Gordian III (AD 238 to 244) offers a revealing snapshot of troubled times. Gordian’s distinctive radiate crown, a spiky emblem of power, denotes that this coin was worth two denarii, although numismatists might rightly wonder how much genuine silver remained beneath his imperial image.

On the reverse of this compelling antoninianus, a figure confidently holds a globe and spear, symbols meant to represent Rome’s global dominance, somewhat ironic given the empire’s instability at that time. Gordian III’s own rise was swift and brutal: elevated by the Praetorian Guard following the murders of the joint emperors Balbinus and Pupienus, he eventually met a similarly violent fate. Betrayed and killed by the Praetorians who had crowned him, Gordian’s reign ended abruptly in distant Mesopotamia.

Originally introduced by Emperor Caracalla in AD 215, the antoninianus began life as a silver coin slightly larger than a denarius and intended to be valued at double its worth. Yet over time, its silver content dwindled dramatically until it became predominantly bronze with just a hint of silver remaining. This debasement mirrors the fading fortunes of the empire itself during that tumultuous period.