1 Pound - Elizabeth II 4th portrait, Cardiff

The Cardiff pound was issued as part of the Royal Mint's rotating series of UK capital city reverses, a program that cycled through designs representing London, Edinburgh, Belfast, and Cardiff across successive years. By 2011, the pound coin was already under serious scrutiny — the Royal Mint's own estimates suggested that roughly one in thirty coins in circulation was a counterfeit, a problem significant enough to drive the eventual decision to replace the round pound entirely with the twelve-sided bimetallic version introduced in 2017.