The new pound coin: national nostalgia booster and crimebuster

It represents “a giant leap into the future,” in the words of George Osborne, “using cutting edge British technology” to “keep several paces ahead of the criminals” and “help to boost public confidence”. A new robot police force, you say? Well no, actually, he was talking about a new pound coin.

Unveiled with a momentous perspective rendering, which depicts the coin as a monumental disk hovering into view like some unearthly mothership, the new pound was hailed as “the most secure circulating coin in the world to date.” The mint estimates that around 3% of current pound coins are fake, amounting to around 45m in circulation, and hopes this new, more complex design will put an end to counterfeiting.

Based on the form of the old threepenny bit, the 12-sided shape will no doubt foil any forgers who don’t have a file to hand. And the two different coloured metals will make it a bit tricky to copy. But there’s more. This super-coin possesses what the Royal Mint gnomically refers to as “Integrated Secure Identification Systems”, or iSIS, to give it that lofty ring of Apple-Mac-meets-classical-mythology.

The product of £2m of research and development over the last three years, iSIS comprises “three tiers of covert banknote-strength security,” says the Mint, “which can be authenticated via high-speed automated detection units to industry-leading levels, including retail and vending equipment.”

So what exactly is it?

“It is not a surface coating,” they tell me. “And it is microscopically small”.

It apparently involves the application of an existing security technology that has been proven over decades in banknotes, but this is the first time it has been successfully embedded into coins. The Mint says these special iSIS coins “do not merely rely upon the metal composition to give a response to a sensor,” but instead it is “the presence of the iSIS material” that makes them virtually impossible to forge. It is “overt, covert and forensic,” they say. AKA: “We’re not telling.”

So what can we read into the design itself? The reverse side will be subject to a public competition, like the 2008 redesign of all UK coinage, which was won by 26-year old Matthew Dent with a brilliant shield design, shared across the six coins like a jigsaw puzzle. The design famously forgot to include the numeral value of each coin, rendering the pieces “totally unworkable as actual coins” in the eyes of some critics – though we seem to have managed okay since.

As for the new pound coin, its 12-sided shape has been declared “distinctly British”, being based on a coin that disappeared after decimalisation in the early 1970s, and it embodies a certain nostalgia for the days before contactless credit cards and the slippery world of the Bitcoin.

“It shows that people still like the tangible,” says Ben Alsop, curator of the Citi Money Gallery at the British Museum. “There is an affection for the threepenny bit among those who can remember it, and it’s one of the most geometrically complex coins ever minted. As our gallery explains, the moment coinage is issued into society, it takes on whole new meanings, from a communicational tool, to religious and devotional functions, it’s not just used in an economic sense. I think the new design marries well with traditional coinage – and it shows coins are here to stay.”

So, pound coin as cultural saviour, national nostalgia booster and high security weapon against crime. A nice distraction from the realities of the budget then.