Birds, bees and Cs: how the King helped to craft his new coins

For many, the death of Elizabeth II almost two years ago was a moment for sombre reflection. For the 1,000 or so staff at the Royal Mint in the Ely Valley near Cardiff, it was also a call to action.
“It was very emotional for us,” says Paul Morgan, the head of coin design, when we meet at the Royal Mint production facility and visitor centre on Thursday. “Everything we produced here had Her Majesty’s effigy on it. But the next morning, I remember looking in the mirror and being hit by the realisation. We’ve got a job to do. And we’ve got to do it well.”
Almost two years on, the results of his labour are glinting before us in a back office at the south Wales site — which combines the dark grandeur of JRR Tolkien’s Mordor with a certain keep-calm-and-carry-on cheer.
This is the full set of Carolean “definitives”: eight shiny new coins to define the reign of Charles III: from the humble penny to the mighty £2. Small sets of commemorative coins were issued for the coronation and then His Majesty’s 75th birthday, but this is the first official set for general circulation.
As we speak, three million pound coins, bearing a new bee design, are jangling their way through post offices and banks and then, if you’re lucky, into your change. The 50p entered circulation last year but everyone agrees, the pound is a landmark moment. “The pound is the iconic coin,” says Gordon Summers, the chief engraver. “In my lifetime, we’ve only ever had one monarch in circulation. So the fact we’ve got the King’s coinage in circulation is pretty important. It’s a whole new era, really.”
Each new coin has the effigy of the King on the “obverse” (the technical term for the “heads” side). The image was modelled in plaster by the sculptor Martin Jennings, 3D-scanned and then inverted into the master tools used to make the steel dies that strike each coin. Charles is looking left. His mother looked right. Monarchs traditionally alternate left and right with the exception of Edward VIII who didn’t like his right side. But none of his coins made it into circulation after his abdication.
On the reverse of the coin (“tails”) is a conservation theme — a representation of the interior of Charles’s head, you might say. Each piece displays a distinctive British animal or plant: a hazel dormouse on the 1p, a red squirrel on the 2p, an oak leaf on the 5p, a capercaillie grouse on the 10p, a puffin on the 20p, a leaping Atlantic salmon on the 50p, two bees on the £1 and a combined rose, daffodil, thistle and shamrock motif on the £2. The conservation theme replaces the fragmented shield design seen on Elizabeth II’s last set of definitives in 2008.
Should one of them turn up in your shrapnel, you might pause to admire the distinctive details that the team of the Royal Mint’s ten in-house designers — recruited from fields as diverse as video games, ceramics and jewellery — spent a year perfecting, in consultation with the King himself. An initial selection of 30 to 40 prototype designs were sent to the Palace in late 2022 and Charles indicated which ones he liked.
A coin designer uses “a very small canvas” to tell a “very big story”, Morgan explains. “The coin needs to have elements that you immediately identify. But it needs to be able to tell a richer story too. If anyone else were to look in, they should be able to say: ‘That’s Britain today.’”
Charles’s head is housed within the silver-coloured nickel-plated brass alloy centre of the £1 coin. On the reverse, however, the bee design flows across the “bimetallic join” into the golden nickel-brass outer rim.
There’s a motif of three interlocking Cs (take that, Coco Chanel), inspired by Charles II, who had a double-C design on his coinage. The Cs stand for crown, community and conservation, the unifying themes of Charles’s coronation speech.
The King was heavily involved in the design, Summers recalls. “The Cs were originally facing down. Charles felt that the C at the bottom looked like an upside-down horseshoe and looked a bit unlucky.” The Cs were duly flipped. “That’s the level of detail he looked at,” says Summers.
The Royal Mint began producing coins in 886 for the reign of Alfred the Great, and moved to its current site in Wales with decimalisation in 1968, having spent most of the last thousand years in the Tower of London. In addition to producing all of our coinage, the Royal Mint made the medals for the 2012 London Olympic Games.
During my tour of the factory, there are surprisingly few coins to be found. Traditionally the chief engraver would be the person who made all of the steel dies used to strike each new coin. Now, Summers reckons he spends 60 per cent of his time on new initiatives: precious metals recovery and using minting techniques in jewellery-making.
Most of the day-to-day work is producing special edition commemorative coins. I see a limited edition Paul McCartney-themed £1,000 silver coin being precision-cut in a machine and I am invited to press a new commemorative 50p with a Hogwarts design. The only actual currency I see produced is a torrent of Mozambican silver coins kerchinging out of a press. But these will soon cease as the Royal Mint winds up its overseas business — producing coins for countries including Jamaica, Iceland and South Africa (the full list is secret) — at the end of the year and reassigns its staff.
It’s not hard to detect a note of anxiety in the air over the transition to a cash-free society. Before I entered the building, I was required to empty all my pockets of loose change. This wasn’t a problem: I didn’t have any.
It’s hard to avoid the existential question. Will these beautiful new coins ever be spent? Earlier this summer, the Treasury announced that it would not be ordering any new 1p and 2p pieces for the foreseeable future. In 2020 the National Audit Office offered a bleaker prognosis. It did not anticipate the need for any new 2p or £2 coins until 2030. The red squirrel 2p may prove to be an even rarer sight than the actual red squirrel.
It would be “disappointing” were the new coins not required, Summers admits. But that’s not to take away from the present moment. “I remember standing with an old colleague the first time we turned over a coin and saw the effigy of the King on there,” Morgan says. “We stopped and looked at each other. Even for us, who have seen a lot of coins, it was very emotional.”