Originally Posted by
kerouac2
The Banque de France at 31 rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs near the Louvre will take your coins.
Are you sure?
https://www.banque-france.fr/succurs...aisse-de-paris says "Uniquement pour les opérations sur billets et reprises de
pièces de collection".
Originally Posted by
tom tulpe
But not the £1 (or any other BoE coins).
Strictly speaking, the BOE doesn't produce any coins.
Originally Posted by
TravellingChris
On a trip to the UK awhile back I had some old-style one pound coins that weren't accepted in shops. I took them into a branch of a major bank at a London shopping mall, showed my Canadian passport and explained I was a visitor. The teller cheerfully exchanged them for me. To be fair, I had only a handful, not a few dozen. But she still did it even though I was not a client.
Yeah, you can try. I would guess about half of bank branches would do a small number of coins for a random person and half would refuse, but I don't know any visitors who have tried in the past year.
Originally Posted by
NotSoFrequentColorado
If you have just a few left on your way home:
If flying BA they go through the cabin asking for ANY currency for their charity. Even old non-spendable coins which can be melted down.
Some airports (in Scandinavia I believe) have places to donate coins for charity.
The majority of airports around the world (or at least in developed countries) have donation boxes. In the UK, charities generally get about 50% or less of the value of any currency donated in this way. Much of it is sold on ebay to collectors at massive profits, but the charities don't see any of that.
Originally Posted by
diburning
Depending on where you are located in the US, you may or may not have a local big bank that also does business in the UK, and they may serve you in the UK with a foreign account if you flash their debit card. Santander is one of them. I believe HSBC is another one.
As for Euro coins, look for places that have self checkouts. If they take cash, self checkouts typically won't balk at the number of coins you put into them.
In Santander UK, there is difficulty in getting them to accept current coins even if you are an account holder, so I wouldn't like to try as a foreign Santander account holder. Many branches of HSBC UK have been converted to self-service so they are unable to accept old coins. Although pre-covid I know a coin dealer from Canada who was able to get HSBC UK to exchange 2000 old £1 coins in one go on the strength of his HSBC Premier (Canada) status.
In France merchants are not obliged to accept more than 50 coins. I have come across this limit when paying at a place where the cashier is a human but coins go in a machine, after I put in 50 coins the slot closed.