The Royal Mint has just posted the 50p mintage figures for the calendar year of 2019, providing the official guide to the rarest coins in circulation. Contenders included three new 50 pence designs celebrating Arthur Conon Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes, and Paddington the Bear at St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London.
Unfortunately as you can see from the image all 3 have a pretty high mintage with Team Sherlock winning. The mintage figures have all now been released for the 4 Paddington Bear 50p coins in circulation with the 2018 Paddington at the Station being the rarest with a mintage of 5,001,000. The 2018 Paddington at the Palace had a mintage of 5,901,000 putting it in second place.
The mintage figures for the 2019 Royal Shield 50p have also been released with a total of 122,000,000. The figure is very high because the first batch of Brexit coins had to be recalled and recycled into Royal Shields. A total of 10 million Brexit coins, each stamped with the date 31 October 2019, were planned to be minted. In late October 2019, with increasing doubts that Brexit would actually happen on that date, the minting of the coins was halted.
