The headline this time is embarrassing and satisfying in equal measure: site search now works the way you always assumed it did. Plus two new tools, a new ranking, and a proper data clean-up underneath.
Search understands years now
If you ever typed "2016 pound" into our search and got nothing, that was not you. Coin names in our catalogue do not contain years, so any search with a year in it quietly failed. Fixed: search now understands years properly ("1887 sovereign" finds the four 1887 sovereign variants), along with "half crown" (the catalogue writes ½), "one pound" and "50p". The search page itself got rebuilt to match the rest of the site too, with proper coin cards instead of cramped rows.
What was old money actually worth?
New tool: Old Money in Today's Money. Enter any amount in pounds, shillings and pence — or tap a coin, guinea included — pick a year from 1751 to 2024, and see its real purchasing power today. A shilling in 1900 bought roughly what £8 buys now; the same shilling by 1970, about £1. Built on the official long-run price index, and every figure on the page recalculates when we refresh the data.
Sovereign values, year by year
Also new: the Sovereign Value by Year chart — every year of the full and half sovereign with mintage and the median price from verified sales over the last twelve months. Where a year has too few sales to be honest about, we show a dash and link you to the coin page instead of inventing a number.
The coins collectors actually buy
The new Most Wanted Coins ranking orders UK coins by how often they genuinely change hands — nearly 27,000 verified sales behind it. Spoiler: the most-bought coin is not the most valuable one, and the gap between the two is the most useful thing on the page.
A truthful data spring-clean
We found and fixed a systematic error that had inflated mintage figures on 235 coins — including showing the 2009 Kew Gardens 50p at 338,364 instead of the correct 210,000. The A-Z 10p figures are now right too, and coin pages show mintage year by year where a design was struck across several years: the 2018 A-Z 10ps were struck 220,000 times each, but the 2019 strikes of the same designs were as low as 63,000 — scarcer than the Kew Gardens, and the date under the portrait is the only way to tell.
The guinea guide now shows the coin's gold value live against the actual gold price, the Sherlock Holmes 50p guide shows real sale statistics instead of a typed-in range, and four guides that failed to load at all (including King Charles III coinage and Newton 50p) are back.
One removal for transparency: the Amazon product panels that appeared on guides earlier this month are gone. eBay sold-listing links remain, always to realised prices, never asking prices.
As ever, if a number on the site looks wrong to you, tell us — the mintage fix above started from exactly that kind of nudge.