The introduction of decimal currency in the UK and Ireland in February 1971 is a subject strangely neglected by historians of the period, despite it being a change which affected the daily life of everyone living in the British Isles at the time. Most histories of the 1960s and 1970s treat it as a mere footnote, an administrative reform of little significance, or ignore it altogether. What commentary there has been tends to be ill-informed, seeing decimalisation either as a harbinger of creeping Europeanisation or the trigger for the inflation of the mid-1970s or both.50 years after "D-Day"...

The introduction of decimal currency in the UK and Ireland in February 1971 is a subject strangely neglected by historians of the period, despite it being a change which affected the daily life of everyone living in the British Isles at the time. Most histories of the 1960s and 1970s treat it as a mere footnote, an administrative reform of little significance, or ignore it altogether. What commentary there has been tends to be ill-informed, seeing decimalisation either as a harbinger of creeping Europeanisation or the trigger for the inflation of the mid-1970s or both.50 years after "D-Day"...