London Underground Roundel £2 (2013)

The roundel £2 was issued into circulation, with slightly fewer struck than of the train design, so it still turns up in change. Circulated coins sell for a modest premium over face value, and one with a crisp bar and sharp lines in the background is worth more than a worn one. Brilliant uncirculated coins from Royal Mint packs, including the two-coin set shared with the train design and the annual coin set, sell for more again.

With 1,560,000 struck for circulation, the London Underground Roundel £2 is the fourteenth rarest of the 44 ranked £2 designs and has the 50th 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 Magna Carta £2, with 1,495,000 struck, and the next more common is the Great Fire of London £2, with 1,625,000 struck.

Look for the roundel set at an angle, its bar lettered UNDERGROUND and reaching from the silver-coloured centre into the gold-coloured ring, with fine slanting lines behind it. One date sits above the roundel and 2013 below, and the value is not written on this side. The other 2013 Underground £2 shows the front of a Tube train instead. The edge settles any doubt: MIND THE GAP belongs to the roundel coin, while the train coin carries a line pattern and no words.

London opened the world's first underground railway in January, a century and a half before this coin, with a first stretch of nearly four miles between Paddington and Farringdon Street. The Royal Mint marked the 150th anniversary with two £2 coins in 2013, and Edwina Ellis, a printmaker who had contributed to the Art on the Underground project, designed the one built around the network's best-known symbol. The roundel first appeared in 1908 on platform nameboards, where it made each station name easy to pick out. Her design takes its inspiration from a 1938 poster by the artist Man Ray and shows the roundel tilted at an angle. Its bar, lettered UNDERGROUND in the Johnston typeface created for Tube signs, reaches from the centre into the outer ring, and fine slanting lines fill the background. The opening year sits above the roundel and 2013 below it. The edge is lettered MIND THE GAP, the phrase most closely tied to the Tube, and Ian Rank-Broadley's fourth portrait of Queen Elizabeth II is on the obverse.

In the London Underground set it was issued in 2013 together with the London Underground Train £2.