As banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed 17 years ago, the tiny Lewes Pound was born. After a packed launch at Lewes town hall, journalists from Japan, Russia and Brazil squeezed into the Lewes Arms pub to watch customers exchange the new currency for a pint of the local beer, Harvey’s.
“It was such a magical, amazing evening. It was beautiful,” said Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the network of Transition Towns which led to the Lewes Pound, Totnes Pound, Brixton Pound and more.
However, on Monday the heady days of quirky pounds draws to a close as the final few shops taking the Lewes Pound stop accepting what is believed to be the UK’s last standing local currency.
The quiet demise is a far cry from the buzz of 2008. The Lewes Pound’s founders hoped for 100 people to buy the currency and 25 businesses to accept it. Instead, 400 people and 75 businesses signed up, recalled Patrick Crawford, director of Lewes Pound CIC.
So many people squirrelled away the initial 10,000 £1 notes as keepsakes and to sell to collectors online that Crawford had to scramble to print another 10,000. The shop at Harvey’s brewery said use of the Lewes Pound was always small. But Miles Jenner, the Lewes-based company’s head brewer, supported it as a means of boosting local trade and pride in the town. Notes featured Thomas Paine, the radical political philosopher who lived in the East Sussex town in the 18th century. Miles Jenner, Harvey’s head brewer DAVID MCHUGH/BRIGHTON PICTURES “In Lewes there is always a swirl of enthusiasm around anything which is slightly off the norm and makes us stand out as being different. It’s entrenched in the Lewes psyche. I don’t think any of us thought it would change the world, but it was just something everybody got behind,” said Jenner. Viktoria Tulcan, who works at Lansdown Health Foods, recalled some customers would only pay with Lewes Pounds, as some of them were paid for jobs in the currency. “This is one of the things that is Lewes. Like the pirate who plays the ukulele on the bridge and the people who walk around in ballgowns,” she said. Viktoria Tulcan of Lansdown Health Foods DAVID MCHUGH/BRIGHTON PICTURES Despite innovations such as eye-catching denominations like £21, the Lewes Pound could not fight the structural shift of people moving from cash to cards. In 2009, one in two transactions in the UK used cash. By 2019, it was one in four. • Cash is no longer king but do we really need the digital pound? Though well-liked, some shopkeepers admitted the local currency was a faff or even a “nuisance”. Tills needed to have a dedicated area for the note, while one Lewes businessman said he could not spend them in Hove, where he lived. David Skeet, who runs the Lewes Flea Market, said “the lady at the town hall who had the tin” to exchange them for sterling was sometimes off. “It was a little bit haphazard. I don’t have anything bad to say about it though, I like the idea of the initiative.” Frances Sterry, who reopened the town’s Cheese Please shop in 2019, said: “Maybe it was a kind of gimmick, but it said something about independent businesses. We’ve lost the lovely idea of it.” The former mayor, Susan Murray, who helped run the currency, was upset about the loss of the Lewes Pound just months after her husband died. “It just feels like a year of mourning,” she said. However, she was clear the currency had changed lives. Lewes has a reputation for having an independent, artistic culture DAVID MCHUGH/BRIGHTON PICTURES A donate-a-drink scheme at the Lewes Depot cinema had customers pay over the odds for a coffee, with the money then given as Lewes Pounds to people at local food banks. “I always remember one lady said for the first time ever she’d been able to go into the local bookshop and buy books for her grandchildren for Christmas,” Murray said. The currency’s legacy will live on. About £10,000 of the remaining backing money will now be donated to four local organisations including the Friday Food Market and Lewes Climate Hub. Hopkins said the Totnes Pound, which he also developed, and other local currencies in Bristol and Stroud, were inspired partly by those such as the Ithaca Hours in the US and Salt Spring dollar in Canada. The British local currencies were driven by the UK’s growing network of Transition Towns, groups dedicated to making places more resilient and self-sufficient. The currency’s attraction was that it kept money in the town: “Jeff Bezos couldn’t hoard Lewes Pounds” DAVID MCHUGH/BRIGHTON PICTURES The bloom of UK local currencies even seeded a flowering elsewhere in Europe. After Hopkins held a £21 Totnes Pound — inspired by Lewes’s quirky denomination — in the 2015 French film Demain, scores of local currencies were created in France. Hopkins said the “rise of plastic” had gradually doomed local currencies, with the Totnes Pound ending in 2019. But the idea was as relevant as ever, he said. “The thing about local currencies was they stayed in that place. The Bristol Pound, in tiny writing, said ‘keeping money out of the Cayman Islands since 2012’. Jeff Bezos couldn’t hoard Lewes Pounds,” he said. Jenner said the currency’s fate was a reminder of the importance of using or losing local businesses. “If you don’t support your local shop and you go to supermarkets, don’t expect them to be there when you go back,” he said.
