Banknote History

History of the Bank of England Note: 1694 to the King Charles III Series

No other central bank can show you three hundred years of its own paper money. The Bank of England has issued notes since the year it was founded, and the line runs unbroken from a handwritten receipt for a bag of coin to a polymer note carrying a hologram and a king.

Founded 27 July 1694 First printed notes 1725 First monarch portrait 1960 King Charles III from 5 June 2024

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Last updated: September 2026

When did the Bank of England start issuing banknotes?

The Bank of England began issuing notes in 1694, the year it was founded. Its first notes were handwritten receipts, known as running cash notes, given to customers for the money they deposited. They were promises to pay the bearer in gold, and that wording survives on every note printed since.

The Bank was founded by Royal Charter on 27 July 1694 to act as banker to the government and to help fund the war against France, with King William and Queen Mary among the original stockholders. It opened for business on 1 August 1694 in temporary rooms at the Mercers' Hall in Cheapside, staffed by seventeen clerks and two gatekeepers (Bank of England). Sir John Houblon was its first Governor, and nearly three centuries later he would appear on the Series E £50 note issued in 1994.

British paper money grew out of the receipts that goldsmiths gave customers for coin left with them for safekeeping, money the goldsmiths held as running cash. Miranda Garrett, Collections and Exhibitions Manager at the Bank of England Museum, has written about one of the earliest Bank notes in the Museum collection, dated 18 June 1697. It is a handwritten fragment promising to pay the bearer £22, and the inscription shows the deposit being drawn down in two payments of £5 and £17. Cashiers were told to issue notes in set denominations, but coin was scarce, so many of the earliest notes were written for odd sums including shillings and pence (Bank of England Museum).

When did Bank of England notes stop being handwritten?

Partly printed notes arrived in 1725. The Bank began printing denominations from £20 upwards in steps of £10, to a maximum of £90, and the issuing cashier wrote in an extra amount of up to £9 19 shillings 11 pence so that the note matched the deposit exactly. Fully denominated notes came later.

Those printed notes are what collectors call white notes: black ink on one side of plain white paper, no picture on the reverse, and large. The Bank's own record of withdrawn notes gives the £20, £30, £40, £50 and £100 white notes as first issued in 1725, the £10 and £15 in 1759, the £25 in 1765, and the £5 in 1793. The biggest of them measured around 211 by 133 mm, roughly the size of a sheet of A5 paper (Bank of England withdrawn banknotes).

The £1 and £2 notes appeared on 2 March 1797, at the start of what is known as the Restriction Period. France had declared war, a French force had landed in Britain, and the public rushed to convert notes into gold; the Bank's gold fell from £16 million to about £2 million, and the government ordered it to stop paying notes in gold. Small notes reached people who had never handled paper money before, many of them unable to read, and forgery flourished. Over 300 people were hanged for forgery during the Restriction Period, which ran from 1797 to 1821 (Bank of England). The £1 notes of this era are nicknamed Newlands, after Abraham Newland, Chief Cashier from 1778 to 1807, whose name appears in the payee clause.

Whose signature is on a Bank of England note?

Every Bank of England note carries the signature of the Chief Cashier, the official responsible for the note issue. There has been a Chief Cashier since the Bank was founded, and since 1870 the Chief Cashier has been the only person to sign the notes. Victoria Cleland took up the post on 2 June 2025.

The first Chief Cashier was John Kendrick, appointed in 1694. The change to a single signatory came in 1870, under George Forbes, and that tradition has held ever since, which makes the signature one of the quickest ways to date a note. The Bank publishes the full list: Abraham Newland from 1778 to 1807, Matthew Marshall from 1835 to 1864, Kenneth Peppiatt from 1934 to 1949, John Fforde from 1966 to 1970, Merlyn Lowther from 1999 to 2003, Andrew Bailey from 2004 to 2011, Sarah John from 2018 to 2025, and Victoria Cleland in two separate terms, 2014 to 2018 and from 2025 (Bank of England Chief Cashiers). Signatures were once written on each note one by one; today the signature is part of the printed design.

What were the Bradbury Treasury notes of 1914?

When the First World War began, HM Treasury, not the Bank of England, issued Britain's first small-denomination paper money. The £1 note appeared on 7 August 1914 and the 10 shilling note on 14 August 1914. Both carried the signature of Sir John Bradbury, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, which is why collectors call them Bradburys.

The first issue was improvised. The notes were designed at the Royal Mint from sketches by Frederick Atterbury, printed by Waterlow Bros and Layton from plates by Eyre and Spottiswoode, and run off on postage stamp paper at 127 by 64 mm. A second series designed by George Eve followed on 23 October 1914 for the £1 and 21 January 1915 for the 10 shillings, printed by De La Rue on proper banknote paper. A third series designed by Bertram Mackennal appeared in 1917 and 1918, carried the signature of N. F. Warren Fisher from September 1919, and changed its heading in 1922 to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Bank of England withdrawn banknotes).

The Bank of England took the two small denominations back on 22 November 1928, issuing the Series A £1 and 10 shilling notes designed by W. M. Keesey and others. These were the Bank's first coloured, two-sided notes for everyday use. Wartime pressure then produced two more landmarks: the emergency £1 of 29 March 1940 and 10 shilling of 2 April 1940 were the first Bank of England notes to carry a metal thread, a feature that became permanent from 1948. The reason was Operation Bernhard, the German scheme that printed close to nine million forged £5 notes with a face value of £134 million, more than a tenth of the British note circulation at the time. In 1943 the Bank temporarily stopped issuing anything above £5. The story is told in full on the page about Operation Bernhard counterfeit pounds.

When did the monarch first appear on a Bank of England note?

On 17 March 1960, when the Series C £1 note was issued with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Until then Britannia had been the only figure to appear on Bank of England notes. The Bank has used several portraits of the Queen since, and portraits are valued as an anti-counterfeiting feature because people notice small errors in a face.

Series C was short and is a favourite with collectors for that reason. Robert Austin designed the £1 of 17 March 1960 and the 10 shilling note of 12 October 1961, the first and only Bank of England 10 shilling note to carry a monarch. Reynolds Stone designed the £5 issued on 21 February 1963 and the £10 issued on 21 February 1964, both of which were the first of their denomination to carry a monarch and to use threaded paper. The 10 shilling note stopped being current money on 22 November 1970, a few months before decimalisation (Bank of England withdrawn banknotes). The wider story of the Queen on money across the Commonwealth is covered in the guide to Queen Elizabeth II banknotes.

Which historical figures have appeared on Bank of England notes?

Historical figures arrived with Series D in 1970, starting with William Shakespeare on the £20. Since then the Bank has put Isaac Newton, the Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightingale, Christopher Wren, George Stephenson, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Sir John Houblon, Elizabeth Fry, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, J. M. W. Turner and Alan Turing on its money.

Series D was the work of Harry Norman Eccleston MBE, the Bank's first full time artist and designer, assisted by Roger Withington. The Shakespeare £20 of 1970 was the Bank's first pictorial note, the first £20 to carry a monarch and the first to use threaded paper; the reverse shows the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. The rest of Series D followed: the Duke of Wellington £5 on 11 November 1971, Florence Nightingale on the £10 on 20 February 1975, Isaac Newton on the £1 on 9 February 1978, and Christopher Wren on the £50 on 20 March 1981.

That makes Florence Nightingale the first woman other than the monarch to appear on a Bank of England note, on a £10 that stayed current until 1994. Two more followed. Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, appeared on the £5 first issued on 21 May 2002, and Jane Austen has been on the £10 since 2017. The Bank named Austen as the face of the £10 on 24 July 2013, four years before the note was issued (Bank of England). For the wider subject see women on banknotes and portraits on banknotes.

Roger Withington designed Series E, which ran from the George Stephenson £5 of 7 June 1990 through Charles Dickens on the £10, Michael Faraday on the £20 and Sir John Houblon on the £50 of 20 April 1994. Later Series E variants replaced Dickens with Charles Darwin on the £10 in 2000 and Stephenson with Elizabeth Fry on the £5 in 2002. Series F brought Adam Smith to the £20 on 13 March 2007 and Matthew Boulton and James Watt to the £50 on 2 November 2011; both stopped being current money on 30 September 2022.

Bank of England banknote series at a glance

The table below sets out the main issuing periods, with the dates the Bank itself publishes, the denominations in each, the people on them and what they were printed on. It is a map of three centuries in one screen.

Dates and denominations from the Bank of England's withdrawn banknotes record and its current banknote pages, read in September 2026. Series dates run from first issue to the date the last note of that series stopped being current money.

When did the Bank of England switch to polymer notes?

The first Bank of England polymer note, the Series G £5 with Sir Winston Churchill, was issued on 13 September 2016. The Jane Austen £10 followed on 14 September 2017, the J. M. W. Turner £20 on 20 February 2020 and the Alan Turing £50 on 23 June 2021. All four current denominations are polymer.

The Bank publishes both the announcement date and the issue date for each note, and the gap is often years. Churchill was announced on 26 April 2013 and issued in 2016; Austen was announced on 24 July 2013 and issued in 2017; Turner was announced on 22 April 2016 and issued in 2020; Turing was announced on 15 July 2019 and issued in 2021 (£5, £20 and £50 pages, Bank of England). Size still rises with value: the £5 is about 125 by 65 mm, the £10 about 132 by 69 mm, the £20 about 139 by 73 mm and the £50 about 146 by 77 mm. The trade offs of plastic against paper are set out in the comparison of polymer and paper banknotes.

Banknotes carrying the portrait of King Charles III were first issued on 5 June 2024, the first time the Bank has changed the monarch on its notes. The King's portrait appears on the existing Series G designs with no other change, and Queen Elizabeth II notes continue to circulate beside them. New King Charles III notes are printed only to replace worn notes and to meet extra demand, an approach the Bank says follows guidance from the Royal Household to limit the environmental and financial cost of the change (Bank of England).

What happens to a withdrawn Bank of England note?

A withdrawn note can still be exchanged. The Bank of England sets no deadline for exchanging its old notes, by post or at its counter in Threadneedle Street, and several high street banks and the Post Office will take the more recent paper notes. That is why a drawer full of old fivers is never a dead end.

The Post Office will swap the paper notes most people still find at home: the £5 featuring Elizabeth Fry, the £10 featuring Charles Darwin, the £20 featuring Adam Smith and the £50 featuring Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Older notes than those go to the Bank by post, to Dept NEX at Loughton in Essex (Bank of England). Collectors should think twice before redeeming anything, because condition, early prefixes and scarce signature combinations can carry a premium well above face value, a point the guide to what determines banknote value covers in detail.

The next chapter is already being written. In July 2025 the Bank announced work on a new series aimed at better counterfeit resilience, and in March 2026 it chose nature, with a focus on wildlife, as the theme. On 3 June 2026 it opened a public consultation on a shortlist of eighteen native species drawn up with wildlife experts, grouped as mammals, birds, and amphibians, insects and fish, with the outcome to be announced by the end of 2026. The Governor makes the final choice, the next series will still carry a portrait of the monarch, and the Bank says it will be a number of years before the notes appear (Bank of England news). If that holds, Series G will become the last Bank of England series built around historical figures, a run that began with Shakespeare in 1970.

For the collecting side of British paper money, including where the value sits and how to start a set, see the Great Britain banknotes guide. For where sterling fits in the wider story of European paper money, see the first banknotes in Europe, and for the broader arc see the history of paper money.

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