The Royal Mint of the United Kingdom, which makes the country's circulating coinage, is also very active in the bullion coinage space and issues many bullion coins which are legal tender.
Additionally, it also makes bullion which is not legal tender and is targeted at investors and not at coin collectors - such as this one.
Bullion bars with this design are part of the Queen's Beasts Completer range released in 2025. The range is the first to feature a square shape with "diamond" (diagonal) orientation of the design.
The Queen's Beasts was an extensive range of non-circulating and bullion coins featuring the ten Queen's Beasts heraldic statues representing the genealogy of Queen Elizabeth II which stood in front of the temporary western annexe to Westminster Abbey for the Queen's coronation in 1953. Each of The Queen's Beasts consists of an heraldic beast supporting a shield bearing a badge or arms of a family associated with the ancestry of Queen Elizabeth II. They were commissioned by the British Ministry of Works from sculptor James Woodford. The statues were uncoloured except for their shields at the coronation. They are now on display in the Canadian Museum of History. There are other statues of the Queen's Beasts, sometimes referred to as the King's Beasts, at Hampton Court Palace and Kew Gardens in London, and on the roof of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The entire series was designed by the famous engraver Jody Clark, who is best known for designing the Fifth definitive portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
The range included coins in a large variety of formats, featuring each of the "beasts" separately, and concluded in 2021 with a "completer" design featuring all of them together. These premium bullion bars re-use that design, but with a different portrait of the Queen at centre. Instead of Jody Clark's effigy of Her Majesty as a reigning monarch which featured on the coins, the bars )probably reflecting the fact that they were not issued during her reign) use the Queen's 1953 portrait by Mary Gillick.
The design also contains the flowers of all four nations of the United Kingdom exactly as they appeared on Elizabeth II’s first-ever commemorative coin, the Coronation Crown in 1953. The same flower motifs also featured on The King’s first commemorative coin, the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial 50p in 2022. |