Matthew Dent was 8 when he fell in love with coins. It was 1990 and his friend brought a recently introduced 5p into school. “It was shiny and I wanted one,” said Mr Dent. “It just looked amazing.” Now, the 26-year-old graphic designer has been announced as the creative force behind the first new British coin series since decimalisation in 1971.

His vision for the coins beat more than 4,000 entries in a 2005 Royal Mint competition to find fresh designs for seven of Britain’s eight circulating coins, from the 1p piece to the £1 coin. The £2 will remain unchanged.

After three years of “deliberation, tweaking and fiddling”, the series, which comes into circulation this summer, was finally unveiled yesterday. It features parts of the royal coat of arms on the reverse and the Queen’s head on the other. “I feel so honoured and privileged,” Mr Dent, from Bangor, North Wales, said. “But it’s going to be the icing on the cake when I see people using the coins I designed for buying milk and bread.”

That moment will have been a long time coming for Mr Dent, who continued his job at a design company throughout the process. “The committee would meet and set deadlines and I would work frantically. Then we would have long breaks,” he said.

“I was working weekends and evenings. I was going to bed at three in the morning. I spent a lot of time apologising to my girlfriend,” he said.

But, despite 16 stages of revision and a committee veto on a “voluptuous female torso” intended for the 50p, Mr Dent said the final designs were true to the original. The images on the 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p can be pieced together to form a whole royal shield of arms. The £1 coin, or “jigsaw box lid”, features the complete picture.

“I want my new designs to intrigue, to entertain and to raise a smile,” Mr Dent said.

Sir Christopher Frayling, chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, said yesterday: “Every designer’s dream is to make an impact on people’s lives and Matthew Dent has achieved this at a very early stage of his career.”

Andrew Stafford, chief executive of the Royal Mint, said that the designs were contemporary but retained “the gravitas and reference to history required for the UK’s coins”.

Phillip Mussell, director of the magazine Coin News, was generally complimentary about the design, but expressed concern that the lack of numerals would pose difficulties for visitors from foreign countries. He added: “Some people may also be unhappy about copper being included, which means [the smaller denominations] will be around for a few years more.” Mr Dent, who lives in London, received £35,000 for his designs and will not be paid any further royalties. “Considering I never expected to get anything when I entered the competition, it’s a brilliant windfall,” he said.

Keen to make amends with his long-suffering girlfriend, he has put a deposit on a flat and “blown it all already”.

All change

— In 2006 the island nation of Vanuatu released a limited edition series of coins in the shapes of various tropical fish

— Zambia created a series of coins to commemorate the Sydney Olympics in 2000 in the shape of the conjoined maps of Australia and Zambia, featuring the Queen’s head and Sydney Opera House and the Zambian coat of arms

— To commemorate the 50th anniversary of rock’n’roll in 2004 Somalia issued a series of guitar coins, in the shapes of Gibson Flying Vs and those used by Gary Glitter and Abba

— Last year, using the latest in coin technology, Mongolia released a talking coin. While one side bears the Mongolian coat of arms, the other side has a picture of John F. Kennedy which declares: “Ich bin ein Berliner”

— Cook Island is working on coins featuring pieces of meteorites. One contains the Brenham Pallasite Meteorite, found in 1882 in Kansas

Source: Times archives

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