We're using "hard" currency less and less these days. It's all going digital.
If this is prompting you to ponder the worth of any old bank notes you have then now is a great time to check.
We all know coins are collectible.
But fragile notes are too.
And some can really scale the heights at auction.
Just last month a £100 note sold for £38,000. A fiver was valued at £32,000 at auction in 2022.
Here are five ways to check if your old banknotes are worth taking to a dealer.
1 - How old is it?
Coins last for millennia.
Banknotes, well, not so much.
Technology has come on, but early banknotes have survived only in very small numbers.
The earliest paper money was printed in China. Image by PHGCOM at Wikimedia.
A recent auction sale catalogue described all pre-1914 banknotes as extremely scarce.
The Bank of England issued the first permanent banknotes from 1695.
These were handwritten to the amount deposited.
They became standardized by denomination and printing over time.
By 1745 a range of notes from £20 to £1,000 was being produced. They still required some handwriting until 1855.
The older your note is, the more likely it is to be valuable.
To this can be added the variable of the signing cashier.
A note in my wallet is signed by Sarah John. She joins a long list of Chief Cashiers of the Bank of England whose signature has validated our paper money. Some were short-lived so their signatures add a collectible variable to older notes.
2 - Where is it from?
The Bank of England is the Old Lady of Threadneedle street in the City of London.
But it's also a national institution.
With communication technology much less advanced, the Bank printed notes at regional branches.
These are rare and desirable today.
There were as many as 14 Bank of England branches, including Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Gloucester, Swansea, Bristol, Leeds, Hull, Newcastle, Norwich, Exeter, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Leicester.
A proposed design for a Bank of Manchester note. Image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg) at Wikimedia.
3 - Who issued it?
The Bank of England was once Just Another Bank.
Legislation through the 19th century - often in response to economic crises, bank runs and panics - helped make it the national bank and gave it a monopoly on bank notes.
That wasn't always the case though. Before 1844 almost any bank could issue notes.
The last Welsh private bank notes were being used until 1908. An English bank, Fox, Fowler and Company issued notes until 1921.
It's only in 1921 that the Bank of England got a monopoly on issuing notes. This is the period when printing becomes more secure and sophisticated. The first double-sided and coloured notes came out in 1928.
Private bank notes may be desirable to collectors where they are scarce or notably attractive and where there is a demand for them.
They are strongly localised and often best sold where they were printed.
4 - What denomination is it?
The higher the value, the fewer are needed. And so the lower the supply and the higher the price now.
That's the usual collector's rule for stamps, notes and coins. (And any object you care to mention.)
This runs true with most banknotes: High value notes are rarer and therefore more likely to be valuable.
For example, a £1,000 bank note from 1935 sold for £32,000 in 2022.
This £1,000 note was worth more than 30-times its face value at auction. Image courtesy of Dix Noonan Webb.
In contrast, a much older, lower-denomination £100 note from 1894 was just £6,000 more expensive a year later.
This isn't an iron rule, but a good general principal.
High face value contributes to rarity and rarity is the key to value.
5 - What's the serial number?
Most modern bank notes aren't worth very much at all.
(It's always worth remembering that all Bank of England issued notes can be exchanged for their face value in modern notes at any time.)
However, there is a market - a quite new and unpredictable one - in these notes, that most often focuses on the serial numbers.
Currently, that's a 10 digit series.
It starts with two letters that run up from from AA alongside two numbers that together form a location grid-reference on the printed sheet.
There are 60 possible positions.
This is the cypher.
For each cypher around 1 million sheets are printed, running up from 000001 to 999000.
And the value is found in those numbers.
Got a note with a very low serial number or an interesting one, like 007, somewhere in it and it could be worth hundreds of pounds.
Churchill notes with 1945 at the start of the serial number have made over £100.
There was a craze for collecting the sequence AK47.
Any set of notes with sequential serial numbers is extraordinarily rare and may be worth in the thousands.
Most of the sales of interesting serial numbers were made on eBay and it's hard market to predict.
However, there's very little to be lost by checking notes you come across and chancing your arm for such a sale when you do find an interesting sequence.
Buy rare banknotes today
Banknote collecting is an excellent hobby. Anyone interested in stamp or coin collecting will likely find it fascinating.
Some bank notes are genuinely beautiful.
All of them tell us something about the time in which they were printed and perhaps handled by hundreds of people.
We have a selection of coins and notes on sale here.
