01/07/25 23:21
A. N. WILSON: When you have been abroad and change your currency back into sterling, is it not reassuring to see that great painter JMW Turner looking out at you from the £20 note? Doesn't the humble fiver - with Churchill on one side and the late Queen or, increasingly, the King overleaf - tell you that you're home? As the Bank of England's chief cashier, Victoria Cleland, says: 'Banknotes are more than just an important means of payment - they serve as a symbolic representation of our national identity and an opportunity to celebrate the UK.' Why then, having lovingly created a suite of designs in recent years that evokes a Britishness all of us are content with - from Churchill on the £5, Jane Austen on the £10, Turner on the £20 and wartime code breaker and computing genius Alan Turing on the £50 - does the Bank now want to risk it all in the pursuit of the dreaded D-word: diversity?
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