Bank of England £2 (1994)

The Bank of England £2 was legal tender but seldom used in everyday change, and circulated examples still sell above face value. Check Britannia and the script lettering for rubbing, and the open field around the seal for scratches, since those decide the grade. The Royal Mint also sold the coin in brilliant uncirculated packs for the anniversary, and a sealed pack sells for more than a loose coin. Cleaned or polished coins, which lose their original surface, sell for less than untouched ones.

With 1,443,116 struck for circulation, the Bank of England £2 is the twelfth rarest of the 44 ranked £2 designs and has the 47th lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Scarce band, for mintages 1,000,000 to 2,499,999.

The next rarer £2 is the Mary Rose £2, with 1,040,000 struck, and the next more common is the Magna Carta £2, with 1,495,000 struck.

Look for an oval seal with a seated Britannia in the middle of the coin, a crown and W and M cypher above it, and a date on either side, with 1994 on the right. Bank of England is written in joined-up script along the bottom. The coin is all yellow metal with no separate centre, and the milled edge is lettered SIC VOS NON VOBIS. No varieties of the circulating coin are recorded.

The Bank of England was founded in the reign of William and Mary, at a time when the state's finances were in poor shape. It was created to handle the government's banking and its borrowing, and it remains at the heart of the UK's financial system. The Royal Mint marked the Bank's three hundredth anniversary with this £2 in 1994, designed by Leslie Durbin. The reverse reproduces the Bank's own corporate seal, an oval showing Britannia seated. Above the seal are the crown and the interlaced W and M cypher of King William and Queen Mary, a link to the monarchs who reigned when the Bank began. The founding year stands to the left of the seal and 1994 to the right, and Bank of England is written across the bottom in flowing script. The edge carries the Latin motto SIC VOS NON VOBIS, which translates as thus you labour but not for yourselves. The coin is single-metal nickel-brass, with Raphael Maklouf's portrait of the Queen on the obverse.