How About UK County 50p Coins Like USA Stetehood Quarter Set

This idea kind of reminds me of how TV shows start in Britain and get exported to the states.

the whole idea actually started in Canada, with their Province commemorative issues, or was that the commemorative half dollars from the US for State Centennials?

Any way not a bad idea but how long would it take, how many Counties are there in the UK?

You could do a sub-set of the ones with people on them: "Worst Teeth on Coins" set

Side note about TV shows, after the major success of Friends in the US the BBC got the rights for it and called it Coupling. Friends out lasted Coupling by a few years and as it was coming to an end NBC (the company that originally made Friends) bought back the idea of Coupling and tried to make a US series also called Coupling... it only lasted a few episodes. It's interesting how the same ideas just get tossed back and forth all the time.

In a sense Britain already does something like this, with the pound coinages featuring different designs for each component-country of Great Britain: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They've been doing it since 1983, which is older than the Canadian province coins you mentioned earlier.


Lots. England is divided into 48 ceremonial counties and 82 local government counties. Then there's Scotland with its 33 shires, Wales with 13 historic counties and six more historic counties in Northern Ireland. Since local government reforms in 1975, the old Welsh and Irish counties no longer have any actual governmental function, they are now just historic and geographic terms. But if you were to use simply the "historic" or "ceremonial" counties/shires from each of the four countries, then that's exactly 100 coins needed to cover the whole of Britain. Then they could also do what America did and throw in an extra 16 coins for the dependencies and territories, although most of these already have their own coinages.


If you don't count the British pounds, it was the Canadians that started the modern trend in one-from-each-region coinage series. But if you want to know the very first country to come up with the idea, the Roman Empire under Hadrian issued a series of denarii for various provinces in the Empire, issued to commemorate the imperial visit during his grand tour of every province; the imperial party took a "travelling mint" with them specifically to strike such coinage. Here's the denarius for Spain, Here's the denarius for Egypt and so forth. Unfortunately, some provinces only rated bronze coinage instead, so you can only collect about half of the actual provinces in the Empire at the time.

The first modern regional commemorative series was from Jersey, I think: one pound coin for each parish of the little island. They have very low mintages (not above 100,000 and in some cases going down to 10,000, but catalog price is really low).

I would like to see the 10p coin used for this set, so that I can afford it!! Having to sock away 50 pounds would be a bit much for me

Japan is even into this with the Prefecture series. So, why not the U. K.?

I suspect, as Sap says, the 4 nations £1 series that are produced fulfill this "need" for diversity. It would be interesting to have a 100 coins series though. Lots of scope for competitions for the best design, that sort of thing.

There might be this £1 coin competition, this could be a county thing. Say each country gets a county every year or something. Maybe I'll do something like that if the competition exists.