£1 Coins
21 tips to complete your Great One Pound Coin Race
The Race is on…
You’ve only got until 15 October to find all 24 circulating £1 coin designs. And after the new 12-sided £1 Coin is released on 28 March, it will get harder as banks start to replace the £1 coins they receive with the new 12-sided £1 coin.
So that’s why we’ve put our heads together to give you 21 Top Tips to complete your Great One Pound Coin Race in time.
- Check your change drawer / change pot
- Ask friends and family
- Go to the bank and change notes to £1 coins
- Swap with the Change Checker web app – changechecker.org
- Befriend the local corner shop / launderette owner and ask them for their £1 coins
- Arcade / bingo change machines
- Pay with a note and round up with loose change to maximise your £1 coin change
- Look for Facebook swap groups
- Raid your children’s piggy banks (and replace them with notes!)
- Look for abandoned supermarket trolleys
- Check down the back of the sofa
- Check old handbags
- Set up a lottery syndicate and collect the payments in round £1 coins
- Have a bake sale – everything a round £1 coin
- Offer to count up any collections and swap out the £1 coins for notes
- Car boot sale – everything is “One Round Pound”
- Pay car park charges in notes and receive the change in coins
- Check any tips your friends might be leaving at restaurants
- Always carry some £1 coins with you so you can swap any time you see a good one
- Check gym lockers
- Try to build a collection as a group – e.g. a school class – 30 Change Checkers are better than 1!
Win a Gold-plated Participant’s Medal
Do you have any more tips?
We’ll be giving away some special 24-Carat Gold Plated Great One Pound Coin Participant’s Medals to the best ideas. Simply comment below with your top tip.
How to enter the Great One Pound Coin Race
If you haven’t started your Great One Pound Coin Race yet, it’s not too late. Simply click here to enter today and you too could own a complete collection of £1 coins direct from your change before they’re gone for ever.
The Great One Pound Coin Race Starts Today – just 250 days to own a complete £1 Coin Collection
You have just 250 days to collect all 24 Round £1 Coin Designs.
They’ve been a part of our lives for 33 years but the Round Pound Coin will be withdrawn from circulation forever on the 15th October this year.
Starting from today, we’re encouraging collectors across the UK, to join the biggest race of its kind ever held – The Great One Pound Coin Race.
It’s totally FREE to enter the Race and by entering you’ll be able to:
- Collect all 24 circulating £1 coins direct from your change
- Receive collecting tips and suggestions to help you complete your One Pound Collection
- Track your progress with the Change Checker web app or on your FREE downloadable £1 Coin Race Sheet
- Swap coins online with other collectors to help complete your collection
- Win exclusive Gold-plated One Pound Coin Race Participant’s Medals
- Receive exclusive participant’s discounts and savings
33 Years of Round £1 Coins. 24 Designs. Gone in 250 days.
The first £1 coin was issued in 1983
The first £1 coin entered circulation right back in 1983 and featured the Royal Coat of Arms as its design. It was quickly followed the next year with a Scottish thistle design, followed by the Welsh leek, Northern Irish flax and the English oak in subsequent years.
In total 24 different designs have entered circulation with five different series representing the component countries of the UK. The remaining four designs have all been variations on the theme of the Royal Coats Arms. A final, twenty-fifth Round Pound Coin was issued by The Royal Mint in 2016 but it never entered general circulation.
Scarce £1 Coins still available for face value in your change
Of course some £1 coins are much rarer than others. It’s partly because mintages of the different designs vary vastly, from less than 1 million coins to over 300 million. But that’s only part of the story. Older issues are also often more difficult to find, especially in good condition.
The 3 lowest mintage £1 coins come from a series of UK Capital Cities issued in 2010/11
The three lowest mintage £1 coins in circulation come from a series of UK Capital City coins issued in 2010/11, with Edinburgh being the rarest with a mintage of 935,000 coins – just 0.04% of all the £1 coins ever struck.
But it’s still possible to find even these rare coins in your change along with all of the other 21 circulation £1 coins. But only for the next 250 days.
Once the 15 October has passed, you will have little chance of building a complete collection of £1 Coins at anything like their face value. So …
on your marks…
Get set…
Go…
The Great One Pound Coin Race is on. Start your race today, before it’s too late.
The new 12-Sided £1 is already a collecting sensation – and it’s not even out yet!
The new 12-sided £1 has grabbed the headlines this week as collector’s really can’t wait to get their hands on one.
In fact, the new coins are proving to be so popular that people are willing to pay way over their face value to get hold of one before the official release date of March 28th.
Currently the only way to get hold of a brand new 12-sided £1 coin is to purchase a 2017 Annual Coin pack (which includes all the coins issued for 2017 struck to a Brilliant Uncirculated finish) or to visit the Royal Mint Experience in Wales and strike your own coin.
Sellers have cottoned on to this and are now selling their coins on auction sites with the ‘justification’ that they are not yet widely available – bids have even been fetching over 5000% their face value. But you really don’t need to pay these prices if you can hold on for a month or so.
The 2016 Trial Pieces
But there’s no doubt that the more interesting pieces are the 2016 trial £1 coins that have also cropped up on online auction sites – one coin even sold for a whopping £200.
However, The Royal Mint has issued over 200,000 trial samples of the new £1 to industry stakeholders in preparation for the new coin. And The Royal Mint has made it clear that these coins don’t have legal tender status and have no redeemable value.
They are most certainly an interesting piece for anyone to have in their collection, but they are not as scarce as some of the recent reports and eBay listings suggest.
To put this into perspective, in 1994, The Royal Mint issued 4,500 packs of trial £2 coins. These packs can now sell for around £150 due to their scarcity.
When can I get a new 12-sided £1 coin?
The new £1 coin is due to enter circulation next month and you can start checking your change then. A Brilliant Uncirculated version of the coin will also be available to buy as an individual collectors piece from the 28th March.
Don’t forget to post a picture to the Change Checker Facebook page when you find one!
Be one of the FIRST people to own the new £1 Coin.
Today you can own all 13 of the United Kingdom’s 2017 coins including the brand new ‘Nations of the Crown’ 12-sided £1 within the latest annual coin pack.