POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY SIMON HEFFER IN THE TELEGRAPH
Simon Heffer, you are right about the beauty of the older coins.
But I do think you are wrong to connect the change in aesthetic quality to decimalization.
Precisely the same observation could be made of the beauty of the coinage of the United States or a number of other countries.
United States coins of many decades ago were also often of outstanding design - buffalo nickel, Standing Liberty silver dollar, double eagle twenty-dollar gold piece, etc. - but today American coins are quite pedestrian in their looks.
The change rather reflects the debased value of coins today - i.e., they are less worth putting a lot of effort into - and also a general change in society's aesthetic values for the worse.
