The Royal Mint is launching four new £5 coins to celebrate the recent royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. There's a long tradition in Britain of producing coins to commemorate royal and other special events, dating back to 1935.

Prior to decimal money being launched in 1971, special five-shilling coins, known as crowns, were released for commemorative purposes. After decimalisation, £2 and £5 coins were minted instead, as the old crowns became 25p and coins of higher value were required to celebrate special events.


Historic coins

The first commemorative crown was produced to celebrate King George V's silver jubilee in 1935. It was made in solid silver, with one side featuring an official portrait of George V (the Queen's grandfather) and the other depicting an art deco picture of St George (the patron saint of England) on horseback and carrying a long sword.

Many more coins have been produced to celebrate historic events. These have included George VI's coronation in 1937, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, the death of Britain's wartime prime minister Winston Churchill in 1965, the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977 and the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1980.

Special £5 coins have been produced to celebrate events such as the Queen's 70th birthday in 1996, the Queen Mother's 100th birthday in 2000 and the diamond wedding of The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh in 2007. Both royal princes have had a coin issued to celebrate their marriage - a £5 coin was minted to mark Prince William's wedding to Catherine Middleton in 2011.


Harry and Meghan coins

The new £5 coin to celebrate Prince Harry and Meghan's recent wedding in St George's Chapel, at Windsor Castle, comes in four different types and prices - with the most expensive costing almost £2,000! The new coins (on sale online at Royalmint.com) depict the newlyweds gazing into each other's eyes.

Manufactured from cupro-nickel (a mixture of copper and nickel), the cheapest coin could be yours for £13. The silver version is £82.50, a thicker silver coin is £155, and the top-priced coin is made of 22 carat gold and costs £1,980. All are collectors' items only and will not be going into circulation.

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Portraits on bank notes

It's not only coins that have an important royal significance. Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch whose portrait appeared on a bank note in 1960.

Apart from her portrait being an interesting aesthetic addition (as it shows the changing face of the monarch over the decades), it is also an important anti-counterfeiting feature.

In general, people tend to notice small differences in facial features, rather than discrepancies in inanimate objects, so if the picture of the queen looks wrong on a counterfeit note, it's more likely to be spotted.


How are coins made?

The Royal Mint produces some two billion coins each year, each one carrying a portrait of the Queen. Engraver Jody Clark designed Her Majesty's latest profile picture. It was the first profile to be designed using computer software, rather than using a traditional sculpting method with clay or plaster.

Drawn in pencil initially, the design was then scanned and edited in 2D form, before being made into a 3D model on the computer - this is used to produce a mould out of CNC-milled steel. The mould is used to strike the Queen's profile design into the blank coins.

The metal used for the coins is melted in giant furnaces at the Royal Mint's 14-hectare site in Llantrisant, Wales. Molten metal is rolled out into sheets of the appropriate thickness. It is then sent through the blanking machine, where circles are punched out of each metal sheet, in the same way that jam tart cases are punched out of pastry.


Hydraulic press

Each blank coin goes through a hydraulic press in the Coining Press Room, where it's sandwiched between the two steel moulds to produce the design. It takes around 60 tonnes of hydraulic pressure to produce the image on the coin. Each machine makes, on average, 850 coins per minute.

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