Nobel prize-winning scientist Maurice Wilkins launches the Royal Mint DNA £2 coin on 22 January 2002. Photograph: Myung Jung Kim/PA
There was a good deal of criticism of the coin designs from the Royal Mint when Britain's currency went decimal in 1971. Somehow, the new coins all looked a little tinny. The new pence piece was tiny, while the half-penny coin was so wee that it required the hands of a tot or toy-maker to pick one off the floor.
No wonder so many people, used to happily large if pocket-straining Half-Crowns and old pennies called the new coins "toy money". And, despite some interesting shapes, such as those of the 50- and later the 20-pence coins, designed to make these easy to distinguish by touch alone, the decimal coins have never seemed quite to reach the stage of feeling entirely right.
Something went very right indeed, though, in June 1998, with the Royal Mint's release of the two-tone £2 coin. Today, there are at least 250 million of these handsome gold and silver coins in circulation. Many of them feature special issue designs, and each is a pleasure to look at and to handle. The £2 coin, somehow, has precisely the size and weight to convey a sense of its monetary value.
The coins feature portraits of the Queen by either Raphael Maklouf or Ian Rank-Broadley on their obverse sides, and a variety of images by artists and Royal Mint engravers on their reverse sides. The most common design is the first 1998 issue depicting, in swirling symbols, the history of British technological achievement. This is by the artist Bruce Rushin, who won the design through a competition open to the public.
Nearly all the special issue £2 coins are well designed. Their subject matter ranges from the centenary of Marconi's first wireless bridge laid across the Atlantic (2001, Robert Evans), the bicentenary of the first steam railway locomotive (2004, Robert Lowe), and the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war (Bob Elderton, 2005).
The outer ring of the coins is made from nickel-brass, the inner from cupronickel. Around the edge are the famous words taken from a letter to Robert Hooke by Sir Isaac Newton, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants". The wonderful thing is that there is absolutely no sign of these fine coins being dumbed down. Indeed, it is all the more remarkable in our crudely privatized era to find a coin capable of retaining more than just its monetary value.
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