I 10p: Ice Cream

Most ice cream 10ps found in change show wear on the swirl and the flake, and the sharper those are, the better the price. Dated 2019, the coin is scarcer than its 2018 twin and usually dearer, because far fewer were struck for circulation. Uncirculated coins from Royal Mint packaging sit above circulated ones.

With 304,000 struck for circulation, the I 10p (Ice Cream) is the joint sixth rarest of the 30 ranked 10p designs and has the joint eighth lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Very rare band, for mintages under 500,000.

The next rarer 10p is the Q 10p (Queuing), with 303,000 struck, and the next more common is the Capercaillie 10p, with 7,100,000 struck.

Its lowest circulation mintage was in 2019, with 84,000 struck.

A soft-swirl ice cream cone with a flake, leaning beside a large I, identifies this 10p at a glance. The tails side carries no other lettering. The heads side, with the Queen's portrait, holds TEN PENCE and the year, 2018 or 2019, and that year is the only difference between the two issues. A 2018 silver proof version was also sold to collectors, but the coin found in change is the ordinary nickel-plated steel 10p.

Ice cream stands for I in the Royal Mint's Quintessentially British A to Z, and the letter's verse sets it at the seaside, where everyone gets a cone. The Royal Mint notes that English cookery books were printing ice cream recipes by the early 18th century, one of them in Mary Eales's Receipts, a recipe book published in London. The design is a whipped cone leaning to the right, its swirls rising to a peak with a chocolate flake pushed in at the top left. A chunky serif I stands to its left, drawn with a drop shadow so it seems to stand out from the coin. The Royal Mint credits the design to The Royal Mint Team, and it was issued in 2018 alongside the rest of the alphabet.

It was one of the 26 coins in the A to Z set issued in 2018.