Collecting UK Coins – Exciting Facts For Collectors

The hobby of collecting coins has made certain currency coins much more valuable than the imprint from the mint that they bear. Human beings have since times immemorial tried to preserve a record of the time gone by in history, and coin collection is another such past time in reminiscence of yesteryear. You can preserve a part of a country’s history by collecting its coins. You can feel and touch the very coins that kings and emperors of the old days did, and other people can get a feel of it too, thanks to the collector.
In United Kingdom coin collection is a well respected hobby simply because English coins really are a realistic representation of the interesting history of this country. They are a true to life representation of the royalty that the country has seen – for instance collectors just love to own the fifty cent coins that were issued by the Royal Canada Mint, to facilitate Queen Elizabeth the second’s golden jubilee year.
Some interesting facts about collecting English coins –
There is a unique way to categorize the kind of United Kingdom coins you wish to collect, very much unlike the American collection system. Say for example, the name ‘new pence’ is used to describe the coins that were minted in the UK between 1971 and 1981. This term was used to make a difference between these coins and the older ancient pennies that were used before this era.
By 1982 collectors felt they needed to reassign a better word in place of ‘new’, a word that would speak of the value of the coin in question. So they started using ‘two’, ‘thirty’ and other prefixes that spoke of the coin value. This was a more accurate description as far as the collectors were concerned.
After yet another year had gone by, the two pence variety were so very common that collectors didn’t bother much about them. The Royal Mint promptly issued a limited edition series of the 2p then, only given to the famous English coin collectors! Today there exist only some twenty 2p coins bearing the ‘new pence’ word on the reverse, and coin collectors try hard to get hold of one of these.

Just as with the history of this fascinating country coin collection in the United Kingdom has seen quite a few changes over the years. The initial change was the decimal factor added to coins. This system denotes a modern value to ancient English coins that are no longer in circulation. The 20 shillings is now called the one pound by collectors.

As you could well imagine by now, collecting coins from the United Kingdom is more than just any hobby. It is collecting a piece of English history, and that is why collectors are so well respected in the country.