You can get your hands on a shiny new £1 coin from today

The new one pound coin has entered circulation and judging by their website, it’s one massive party over at Royal Mint HQ right now:

We can picture the scenes: employees downing champagne before jumping, Scrooge McDuck-like, into massive piles of the new 12-sided nuggets:

The Mint has produced 1.5 billion of the new coins, and it’s been touted as the ‘most secure in the world’ with its attributes including a hologram. We guarantee some dodgy geezer in Dagenham is, right now, working out exactly how to forge it – an issue that affected the coin it replaces, with as many as 1 in 30 of them currently believed to be fakes.

The old and the new pound will co-exist for six months before the old ones are gradually removed from circulation; the old pound will cease to be legal tender from 15 October. There’s clearly a lot of interest the new coins given that there was an actual queue to get onto the Royal Mint website this morning.

However, as with any happy occasion, there’s still some bad news as it’s been reported that many places such as vending and ticket machines aren’t yet ready to accept the new coin. Even Tesco isn’t 100% ready, with some of its trolleys not yet upgraded.

The new coins have a gold-coloured outer ring and a silver inner ring and are based on the design of the old threepenny bit, which went out with the move to decimalisation in 1971:

The round pounds bow out after a distinguished period in service, first entering people’s wallets back on 21 April 1983. They grow up so fast don’t they?

If you can’t wait to see one in the flesh, there’s all kinds of special edition ones available at the Royal Mint right now – if the site doesn’t crash first of course.

Money money money money money.

[Images: Royal Mint/Rex]