Supersonic, Uneconomic, Unrepeatable - Very British

A new 50p to celebrate Concorde. Very British. We’ve always loved commemorating the magnificent failure. We don’t do triumph in this country unless it’s slightly haunted, faintly uneconomic, and wrapped in nostalgia.

Concorde was an engineering miracle. Needle nose, supersonic, and completely uninterested in what accountants think. Britain and France basically saying, if the Americans can put a man on the moon, we can at least get a businessman to New York before his drink warms up and he starts asking questions.

And it worked. That’s the irritating bit. It wasn’t one of those “great idea, shame about physics” projects. It actually flew, it was safe, it looked magnificent, and it made a noise that suggested it was personally offended by the concept of quiet. If you lived under the flight path you didn’t need an alarm clock, you needed ear defenders and a sense of humour.

It also didn’t make any money. Or not enough money to justify the whole thing, anyway. Which is where it becomes properly British. A beautiful, expensive, impractical triumph that turns out to be a commercial disaster. The sort of thing we’re brilliant at, right up until we have to pay for it.

Concorde was the perfect machine for a world that never quite arrived. Too costly, too noisy, too politically awkward, and too early. The future took one look and said, “Yes, lovely, but can you do it with budget airlines, plastic seats, and a sandwich that tastes of damp regret?”

So now we’re minting a coin. Of course we are. We can’t resist turning a mad, glamorous, slightly embarrassing chapter of history into something you can lose in the washing machine.

And I don’t even mean that entirely as a dig. It’s not just nostalgia, although there’s plenty of that. It’s the fact Concorde reminds us we used to do big things without immediately asking if they’d pay for themselves by Tuesday. We’d argue, we’d overspend, we’d get stroppy with each other, and then we’d build something astonishing anyway.

These days we still talk about being “world-leading” at everything, but mostly we mean “world-leading at announcing things”. We’ll spend a decade arguing about a railway line, or a reservoir, or whether a town is allowed a bypass without upsetting a badger, a hedge, and three different committees. Meanwhile the big ideas get filed under “too difficult” and quietly die of paperwork.

So yes, Concorde failed as a business model. But as a statement of intent it was magnificent. It was Britain and France doing something hard and glamorous because it could be done, not because it made sense on a spreadsheet.

Now it’s on a 50p. Which feels about right for modern Britain. Something extraordinary, reduced to something you find down the back of the sofa while looking for the remote.