About this site
This resource has been commissioned to showcase some of Birmingham museum and art gallery's numismatic collections.
(coins, paper and medals and tokens).
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s collection of approximately fifty thousand coins, medals and tokens tells the story of money from ancient times to the twenty-first century. The collection includes coins from Ancient Greece, Rome, India and China, and Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as a large number of coins and tokens made in Birmingham in the 18th to 20th centuries for countries all around the world.
Among the items in the collection are –
- examples of the tokens given to the workers on Indian tea plantations for each bag of tea they picked;
- coins struck at Matthew Boulton’s Soho Mint in Handsworth in the 1790s for use in a colony of freed slaves that had just been set up in Sierra Leone;
- Chinese silver dollars struck in the years around 1900 on minting machinery made in Birmingham and shipped out to China
- there are also examples of some of the more unusual types of money that have been used in various parts of the world at various times, like the iron ‘kisi pennies’ (thin iron rods) used as a form of traditional currency in West Africa.
To enquire about the collection or to make an appointment to see any objects in the collection, please contact:
BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM & ART GALLERY
Chamberlain Square
Birmingham
B3 3DH
Tel: +44 [0]121 303 2834
bmag_enquiries@birmingham.gov.uk
(Like all museums, Birmingham is not able to give any valuations on objects submitted for identification.)
