Diana Sterling 
Royal Mint Products: Are They Worth Buying? Walk into any coin fair in the UK – whether it’s the London Coin Fair at the Holiday Inn on Bloomsbury Street or a local numismatic club meeting in a draughty village hall – and you’ll almost certainly hear a debate about Royal Mint products. Some collectors swear … Read more
How to Organise a Coin Collection for Easy Reference There is something quietly satisfying about tipping a bag of coins onto a table and knowing exactly where each one belongs. Whether you have just started picking up interesting 50p pieces from your change or you have been accumulating British and world coins for years, the … Read more
Cleaning Coins: Why You Almost Always Shouldn’t You’ve just picked up an interesting old coin at a car boot sale in Lincolnshire, or perhaps you’ve inherited a small collection from a grandparent who spent decades quietly gathering British coppers and silver. The coin looks a bit dull, maybe a little grimy, and your instinct is … Read more
How to Store Coins Safely: Albums, Capsules and Folders Getting Started: You Don’t Need to Overthink This One of the first things new collectors worry about is storage. You’ve picked up a handful of interesting coins — maybe a few old British pennies, a commemorative 50p, or a circulation find that caught your eye — … Read more
King Charles III Coins: What Collectors Should Know There is something quietly thrilling about holding a brand-new coin and knowing you are among the first people in the country to own it. That feeling hit me properly in September 2022, when I pulled a 50p piece from my change at a petrol station on the … Read more
The Old Penny: History and Collectability Introduction: Why the Old Penny Matters Few British coins occupy as prominent a place in the national consciousness as the old penny. Heavy, copper-red, and bearing the stern profile of the reigning monarch, it was the working coin of everyday Britain for well over a century. You could buy … Read more
Pre-Decimal UK Coins: A Beginner’s Introduction Before 15th February 1971, British money worked on a system that had been in use, in one form or another, for over a thousand years. Pounds, shillings, and pence — often written as £sd — formed the backbone of everyday commerce across the United Kingdom. When decimalisation arrived and … Read more
Rare 50p Coins: A Collector’s Guide to UK Commemoratives The Coin That Started It All It was a Tuesday afternoon in a Tesco in Shrewsbury when my aunt first noticed something odd about her change. She’d bought a loaf of bread and a tin of soup, and as she dropped the coins into her purse, … Read more
Understanding UK Coin Grades: From Poor to Mint State My grandmother kept a biscuit tin under her bed. Inside it, wrapped in a scrap of chamois leather, was a 1953 coronation crown — a large, heavy coin that had been given to her as a child to mark the Queen’s accession. She had no idea … Read more
British Coins: A History from the Penny to the Pound There are few hobbies that connect you so directly to British history as coin collecting. Hold a Victorian penny in your hand and you are touching the same object that a factory worker in Manchester, a fisherman in Cornwall, or a shopkeeper in Edinburgh once … Read more