dddc

If you are visiting London and go to Bank and then the Bank of England, you can change any old currency for new there. But that's if you, or your friend are going to it. Otherwise those charity boxes you see at airports might be an easy way to make some use of them.

:D!

Coins cannot be exchanged at the Bank of England (and neither can old currency that isn't Bank of England - i.e. Scottish/Irish/Gibraltar etc)

New pound coins can just be spent. A minority of merchants don't accept cash but it isn't hard to find one that does.

If your UK friend has an account with a bank that has branches with tellers in a convenient location, then they should be able to easily deposit the old coins.

But high street banks have closed many branches in recent years, many people have accounts with branchless banks, and some branches only have machines for cash deposits, which stopped accepting the old pound coin in 2018.

kerouac2

The Banque de France at 31 rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs near the Louvre will take your coins.

tom tulpe

But not the £1 (or any other BoE coins).

kerouac2

Of course not. Money in GBP/UKL has become worthless on the continent. (just kidding)

Dring my last trip to England I had 6 or 7 "old" pound coins that were losing their validity the following month; I spent them all at the airport and the cashier was quite unhappy to receive them but could not refuse them.

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.

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.

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.

:D!

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".

Strictly speaking, the BOE doesn't produce any coins.

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.

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.

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.

kerouac2

The Banque de France accepts the deposits of all of the shops in the area. Obviously, the coins must be in official rolls.

In the old days, when slot machines in casinos still used coins, they were happy to dump any number of coins into their counting machines. Now that they have moved on to paper tickets with bar codes, I wonder what happened to all of those machines.

fransknorge

For those who say that paying a large bill with small coins can not be refused by the merchant in France, this is wrong. A merchant or service provider can refuse a payment by cash if this payment is done using more than 50 coins.

https://entreprendre.service-public....2%AC.,%2C%20SA...).

nk15

I think you will be fine. Here is a tutorial...

nk15

476 euro in 1 and 2 euro coins are not bad. Take all of these with you, or at least half, and use them as you go. They will be perfect for small bills up to 20-30 euro, but even if you have to use a couple of times more than that it will be fine. There may also be small convenience stores that may accept a bunch of them and change them for paper money, but you may have to buy something so they can open the register. For bakeries they will also be perfect. Taxi drivers may also change them for paper money and will like them as payment. You can also tip Uber drivers in coin (in Europe) and in the UK in pound coins.

Just go to any small shop in France and ask them to change some for paper money, like 30-50 euro at a time.

TravellingChris

We were in London again last month and still had a few old-style one pound coins that we brought along with us. Brought them into a Lloyds Bank branch, explained that we were Canadian visitors and the teller happily changed them. We were in and out of the branch in under 10 minutes.

YVR Cockroach

And neither do most monetary authorities around the world for whatever (probably historical) reason. Coinage is issued "directly" by the government (through a mint) while notes are issued by the central bank.



Cite above is why the Bank of England (and other component countries of the U.K.) issues notes while the Royal Mint produces coins. I'm sure the same setup exists for most if not all of the E.U. member states. For France,Monnaie de Paris produces coins while Banque de France (well, through the ECB) issues notes. In the U.S., it's the Federal Reserve Bank (and issued not by a central bank but one of the several branches - Boston, NY, SF) and the U.S. Mint respectively (at least two remaining mints unit recently- Philadelphia and Denver)