Which Alan Turing £50 notes should you be looking out for?

On the day that would have been Alan Turing’s 109th birthday (23rd June 2021), The Bank of England issued their final banknote in the polymer series, celebrating the famous scientist and mathematician.

The new £50 note is full of exciting design and security features, including:

• A photo of Turing from 1951 which is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection,
• A design of Turing’s trial model of his famous Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine,
• Technical drawings for the British Bombe,
• Ticker tape depicting Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code, and
• A large see-through window depicting a metallic microchip image with clovers around the outside in dedication to Bletchley Park, where Turing conducted most of his work in WW2.

You can find out more of the exciting features on the UK’s first-ever polymer £50 note here >>

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Keen collectors were eager to hunt down the most sought-after serial numbers on these notes, as when the UK’s first polymer £5 note was released in September 2016, serial numbers became the talk of a nation! We saw countless stories of early serial numbers selling for thousands of pounds on the secondary market.

In fact, an “AK37 007 James Bond Bank of England Polymer £5 note” even sold for £5,000 on eBay – 1,000 times its face value!

But which Fifty Pound note serial numbers should you be looking to get your hands on?

AA01 – the first notes to be printed

AA01 are the first serial numbers to be printed and always prove popular with collectors.

Our eBay Tracker follows the prices of the UK’s Top Coins and Banknotes, including the first King Charles III £5 and £10 notes. Historically, we’ve seen collecting frenzies, with people paying (and demanding) vastly inflated prices for low serial number notes.

Prefixes on the £5 notes started at AA and there are 60 notes on a sheet, AA01- AA60. For each of these cyphers there are 999,000 serial numbers printed: 000001 to 999000. Therefore for the first AA cypher there’s an incredible 59,940,000 notes!

Whilst the £50 note is larger than the £5, meaning less notes will be printed per sheet, there are still A LOT of combinations for AA cyphers on the new £50 – so make sure you keep your eyes out for them!

However, The Bank of England will always hold back some of the notes with the earliest serial numbers, donating them to people or institutions that were involved in the development of the note or who traditionally receive a note when a new series is issued.

For example, Bletchley Post Office was one of the first places to have the new £50 note in 2021, in recognition of the the work done by Mr. Turing and his team at Bletchley Park.

Key dates to look out for

It’s always worth looking out for certain serial numbers matching key dates relating Alan Turing that could be considered collectable.

For example, 23 061912 represents Turing’s date of birth, whilst 07 061954 relates to his death and 19 121954 would be his birth and death combined.

True Turing fans might also look for 09 071941 representing the date that the enigma code was cracked by Turing and his team at Bletchley Park during WW2.

Novelty numbers and Consecutive notes

There may well also be a rush to find the AK47 serial numbers again and James Bond 007 will likely be popular once more.

Consecutively numbered notes are always interesting to collectors too – one man sold three consecutive AA01 notes for £456!

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Have you found any interesting serial numbers? Let us know in the comments below!

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Store, Protect, and Present your Banknote collection with the Complete Polymer Banknote Collecting Pack

The Change Checker Polymer Banknote Collecting Pack has space to securely house all four polymer banknotes featuring Queen Elizabeth II and the four new polymer banknotes featuring King Charles III, including:

• Sir Winston Churchill £5 Polymer Banknote
• Jane Austen £10 Polymer Banknote
• JMW Turner £20 Polymer Banknote
• Alan Turing £50 Polymer Banknote

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