Britain uses the pound sterling, symbol £, code GBP. It is the oldest currency in continuous use anywhere in the world, with origins in Anglo-Saxon England over 1,200 years ago.
The coins and notes
Coins: 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 and £2. The £1 coin was redesigned in 2017 into a twelve-sided bimetallic shape because the old round one was being forged on a large scale — around one in thirty was fake.
Notes: £5, £10, £20 and £50, all now printed on polymer rather than paper. They are waterproof, harder to counterfeit, and survive the washing machine, which the old ones very much did not.
Quid
The universal slang for a pound, and it does not take an “s” in the plural. Twenty pounds is “twenty quid”, never “twenty quids”. Other terms you will hear:
- A fiver — £5. A tenner — £10.
- A score — £20.
- A ton — £100.
- A grand — £1,000.
- P — pence, said as the letter. “Fifty p”, not “fifty pence”.
The King’s head
Coins and notes bearing Charles III entered circulation from late 2022, and — following a long-standing tradition — his portrait faces left, the opposite direction to his mother’s. The direction has alternated with each monarch since Charles II.
Elizabeth II’s coins and notes remain legal and will circulate alongside the new ones for many years. There is no plan to withdraw them early.
Scottish and Northern Irish notes
Three Scottish banks and four Northern Irish banks issue their own banknotes. They are valid currency throughout the UK — but, technically, they are not legal tender in England and Wales, a distinction that matters much less than people think and is used to justify shopkeepers refusing them anyway. If you are travelling south from Scotland, spending them before you leave saves an argument.
Paying for things
Britain is close to cashless. Contactless card and phone payment is accepted almost everywhere including buses, market stalls and taxis, and many venues now take no cash at all. Chip and PIN has been standard since 2006, and signing for a card payment reads as distinctly odd here.
The euro
Britain never adopted it, even before Brexit. It secured an opt-out at Maastricht in 1992, and successive governments declined to join. Sterling carries genuine emotional weight as a marker of independence, and the euro question was politically settled long before the referendum that followed.