Posts Tagged ‘£5 Note’
Could your King Charles III Banknote be worth £17,000?
Whenever new banknotes are issued, it causes quite a stir in the collecting community, with serious collectors rushing to secure the notes with the lowest serial numbers.
The Bank of England generally hold back some of the notes with the earliest serial numbers, donating them to the monarch, people or institutions that were involved in the development of the note, but others can fetch hefty sums at auction!
King Charles III banknote under the hammer
In August 2024, Spink & Sons held four auctions, one for each denomination of the King Charles III banknote to raise funds for charity, and a whopping £914,127 was raised overall!
The proceeds from the auctions were shared between 10 charities that were chosen by the Bank of England:
- Childhood Trust
- The Trussell Trust
- Shout
- Carers UK
- Demelza
- WWF-UK
- The Brain Tumour Charity
- London’s Air Ambulance Charity
- Child Bereavement UK
- The Samaritans
At the auction for the King Charles III £10 banknotes, a single £10 note with the serial number HB01 000002 sold for an astonishing £17,000!
The £50 banknote auction even broke the record for the highest lot sold in a Bank of England banknote auction. A sheet of 40 £50 banknotes sold for £26,000 – 13 times their face value!
Which serial numbers should you be looking out for?
Whilst the very first banknotes aren’t released into general circulation, there are other serial numbers that are also considered collectable.
JMW Turner £20 Notes
As the polymer £20 note featured JMW Turner on the reverse, some serial numbers matching key dates relating to the painter became highly collectible. For example, 23 041775 represents Turner’s date of birth, whilst 19 121851 relates to his death and 17 751851 would be his birth and death combined.
Image Credit: Bank of England
True Turner fans might also look for 18 381839 representing the date he painted ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (which featured on the new £20 note) and the date the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy respectively.
Alan Turing £50 Notes
The £50 note features famous scientist and mathematician, Alan Turing, and similarly to the £20 note, certain serial numbers matching key dates relating to Alan Turing became collectable.
Image Credit: Bank of England
Serial numbers such as 23 061912 (which represents Turing’s date of birth), 07 061954 (which relates to his death) and 09 071941 (which represents the date that the enigma code was cracked by Turing and his team at Bletchley Park during WW2) are all ones to look out for. .
Others include AK47, due to the machine gun connotations, and 007 which could be desirable to James Bond fans.
The hunt is on!
With this news that King Charles III banknotes have sold for much more than face value, the hunt is on to find others with interesting or collectable serial numbers.
If you’ve come across any King Charles III banknote, let us know in the comments where you found it and whether it’s got an interesting or rare serial number!
Safely store your King Charles III banknote collection
If you do have any King Charles III banknotes in your collection that you don’t fancy parting with, you can securely store them in the Change Checker Complete Polymer Banknote Collecting Pack, which now includes spaces for King Charles III banknotes!
First look – the new Churchill £5 note revealed…
The New Sir Winston Churchill Polymer £5 Note © Bank of England [2015]
The new £5 note features an image of Sir Winston Churchill, alongside the famous quotation from his first speech as Prime Minister: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’
In the background the clock on Queen Elizabeth’s Tower reads 3pm, the time Churchill was making his speech in 1940. Behind the Houses of Parliament you can see the Nobel Prize for literature which the great statesman won in 1953.
The other side of the £5 note featuring Queen Elizabeth II © Bank of England [2015]
But most importantly…
When can I find one in my change?
The new note will enter circulation on September 13th this year. However, with millions of existing five pound notes still in use you may not be able to find one straight away.
Will I still be able to spend my current £5 notes?
Yes you will, but only up until May 2017. After that, they will cease to be legal tender – but you will still be able to exchange them at the Bank of England.
So the new era of Plastic Banknotes is officially upon us! What do you make of the new design? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter or in the comments below.
You can Find, Collect and Swap all of the UK commemorative coins you find in your change for free on the Change Checker Web App… try it here now: www.changechecker.org/app