The Bank of England Museum

In our class at school we are learning about financial literacy with Mrs Barnes.  This week is money week at my school in New Zealand.  So while we're in London we thought we would go to the Bank of London Museum to find out more about money and how it works.

ENGLISH BANK NOTES

In this photo I am doing some puzzles putting together English Banknotes.  In England they don't have dollars they have pounds.

On each banknote they have a picture on the front and a different famous person on the back.

Each one also has protection also known as security features.  Each note has different  features.  The features stop bad people from being able to make fake notes because they are hard to copy.

Here Finny is holding a 20 pound note from Mum's wallet under the UV light.  Can you see the shiny number 20? That can only be seen under the special UV light and is a way that you can check if the money is fake or not.

Here is a close up of the glowing number 20 under the UV light.

Now Finny is checking for microlettering by using a magnifying glass.  Microlettering is teeny tiny letters written under the picture of the queen  

 Now I'm holding the note up to the light box.  

Up close you can see a watermark which is a picture of the queen.  Also there are some little metal dashes on one side of the note.  It is actually a band of metal right through the note.  When you hold it up to the light it becomes one straight line.

I learned that from next year notes will be printed on a thin plastic called polymer.  I think if I was the bank I would do that because it would mean the notes would break less easily.  It would also make it harder for bad people to make fake money.

Where did the notes come from?

I wondered where the idea of notes came from.  Also why would they call them pounds?

This is what notes first looked like.  If somebody had some gold they would take it to the bank and ask for the bank to take care of it.  But they would want the bank to give their gold back when they needed it.  So the bank would write them a special note with a promise written on it that the bank would pay back the gold.  The gold was measured by weighing it in pounds.  So that's how pounds got their name.

Today's notes still have a promise written on them too!

THE JOB OF THE BANK

We also watched a video about what the job of the bank is.  It's very complicated... but here are some things it does.

1.  The bank's job is to keep inflation at 2%.  Inflation is when the prices of things we buy go up.  If the prices of everything goes up we can't buy as many things with our money.  So the value of the money is less.

2. They look after gold.

3. They have to make sure the money can't be faked.

4. If other banks get in trouble they can help them out.

This is Britannia who is the emblem of the bank. We had to count the number of coins beside her.  She had 55 coins!

GOLD!!!

At the bank we watched a cool video about gold and how the bank takes care of it.  Then there was an actual, real gold bar we were allowed to touch.  It weighed 13 kilograms which is more than Patchy!

There were lots of cameras so that nobody stole the gold. It was worth nearly 300,000 pounds.  Just for one bar!!!!

This machine used to be used for weighing the gold.

Here we are having a virtual tour of the bank.  It even has a garden with a great climbing tree.  

And here are the gold vaults!  There was SO much gold in big racks.

Other Activities

We had lots of fun filling out 'Explore the Bank' Activity sheets as we went through the bank.  We had to find lots of fun and interesting things.

I also got to colour a fun mask.

It was so cool to go the Museum and find out tons about money.  At first I didn't even know that money had protections.  Now I know all about money.