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50 pence collecting is very new, but I think it's a fashion which will last, so I would expect some of these other sets to get more attention, and it's great for the hobby - I think past waves of coin collecting have sprung out of people being able to find rarities in their change - think of US collecting in the immediate post-war period (when you could get things like 1932 D quarters in your change), or the British market in the 1960s around decimalization. Whether it will make the 1970s sets worth £50 each is another matter. I hope not, but then on the other side the wholesale price being around £5 a set at auction is a little silly, especially given the difficulty of finding some of the sets with red lustrous copper - I went through a whole dealer's stock of them recently and found none I wanted to purchase. Probably the value for all of these will settle somewhere in between.

The reality is that supply of all of these is somewhat "thin", even if they're not scarce in any meaningful sense. There may have been 100,000 issued e.g. for 1974 but some of these will have been split up/damaged/ugly toned, and the vast majority of the others will be owned by collectors and other people who bought them close to the release date. The number immediately accessible to the market is going to be in the low thousands, and that's the sort of supply which can be overwhelmed by sudden demand. Unlike the Kew Gardens 50 pence pieces, I don't think this is a case of someone stashing these away with an expectation of profit (yet !); there really are enough customers to exhaust demand at least temporarily.

cake please