“As coin use declines, so do our values”
When I was Chief Engraver at the Royal Mint, I often wound up in unusual situations at the business’ behest (an appearance on the Alan Titchmarsh show being the pinnacle, but that story is for another day).
On one occasion, I found myself in a high rise office in Central London, judging a competition that tasked school children to design coins celebrating their local region.
I recall some lovely entries, but to be frank, what sticks in my mind most was the disconcertingly high number of designs celebrating the “Monkey Hangers of Hartlepool”.
Learning about money still features in the Primary curriculum (there's nothing to harden the ego quite like seeing your kids learn all about money and them never once mentioning in class that their dad designs it) , but the counting of pennies is generally a vehicle for broader maths skills – calculating a sum from various integers, addition and subtraction. Profit and loss. All good stuff.
We teach our kids about money, and we use it to teach them a lot of other lessons, but we don’t teach them about currency, or value - essential attributes to any money system, and a springboard for many other important humanitarian lessons.
There’s a simple elegance to the concept behind currency – a robust system of commonly shared value that accommodates, but transcends, individual resonance.
There’s an assumption that physical money evolved from the need to handle economies beyond subsistence living, but in his book ‘Debt - the first 5000 years’, author David Graeber suggests that evidence points to the inverse. Mesopotamian cuniform tablets dating back 5000 years show sophisticated accounting - one tablet from the Sumerian city of Uruk shows a demand for barley as war reparations, the cost exceeding the US’s current annual barley production by a factor of 600. It’s an enthusiastic demand, and the first written evidence of compound interest. The first physical coins didn't arrive until around 5-600BCE, so did economic common value and trust engender the creation of currency, as opposed to currency paving the way for econimic trust?
I'm being anecdotal, but you get my point.
Maybe coins aren’t the origin of shared trust, as I always assumed them to be. They are, however, our most ubiquitous display of it.
A set of tokens must demonstrate 3 factors to become a currency – it must be issued by an authority. It must have an exclusivity of manufacture, usually handled by that same authority (otherwise I'd be down Aldi jingling a pile of bottle caps with my face drawn on them in Sharpie). Finally, it must be trusted by the society that operates under that authority (or recognises it, in the case of international affairs).
Here’s a nice clip (apologies for the quality)
When we teach our kids about coins, we could be teaching them to identify shared value. We could be asking them to consider what can be offered up to a stranger and held in the same value by both giver and receiver. We should teach them to look at coins as markers of social trust – as evidence that, in concept at least, we can create a tangible common social value.
The Royal Mint used to run an annual medallic art project with jewellery students from the Royal College of Art. After a few lacklustre years of focussing on sculpture, I re-jigged the brief to look at the core concepts behind currency, and called it "Added Value".
Students were each given a single silver blank (the disks of metal from which coins are made) worth just a few pounds in bullion, and asked to “add value” to them. I gave them a few tricky rules to follow regarding weight to keep the project firmly rooted in design, rather than art.
The results were intriguing. One student filmed himself attempting to buy common goods like crisps and tea – unsuccessfully offering silver in excess of the value of the item he was buying. Another student stretched her blank into wire, amazingly teasing it out to the same length as the distance from the workshop to her parents house – about a mile, connecting two places of value.
1oz silver blank stretched to a mile of wire. Apologies for the poor photo - 2008 tech!
One notable variation was a blank polished to mirror finish, and placed into an old purse, the inside silk of which had been printed with the design of a pound coin. When placed in the purse, the blank reflected the design and thus became a ‘coin’. When removed, it reverted to simple bullion. Conversations about brand value and avarice abounded.
I have a few photos of the project (AI sharpened, so forgive the w/mark), but commercial pressures saw the end of the collaboration. That first foray into the concept of value was also the last.
RCA "Added Value" project exhibition, 2008
In the subsequent years, I’ve toyed with adapting that project for a younger audience – to set kids the task of designing a currency within their school environment. What could they come up with if they travelled around the classrooms finding out what ideas, emotions and attributes were of ‘common value’.
Over 25 years of designing coins, I've noticed that national currencies tend to veer towards designs that demonstrate inherent ‘values’, whether that’s historical achievements prevalent in UK and European countries, agriculture in West Africa, or the duality of personal freedom vs national pride that oftens comes through in the narrative of US coins.
I love the idea of asking children to bring the values of their school microcosm to the table, and then walking them through the process of creating a visual language from that - an actual currency, designed around the ideas that they hold close.
What might we learn from our kids if we set them to visually curate their own inherent, ground level, common values, without enforcing the ubiquitous categories of “peace, love and good happiness stuff” (to quote Steve Vai’s ‘Blue Powder’).
What might evolve from a consideration of coins not simply as transactions of accounting, but as transactions of shared human value? I’ve mused on and off for years about why 'homeless' currencies never gain traction. I’m convinced that it’s in part because they always start from the concept of money, rather than of shared value. If anyone wants to de-bunk me on that, or better yet push that conversation forward, please drop me a line.