Can't find Great Britain 5 pound note

I can't figure what I'm doing wrong. I do a search under “United Kingdom” for the string “5 pounds” and restrict it to banknotes / paper exonumia. Looking at the post 1971 results, none of them is a real British banknote. I've also tried using filters for face value and denomination, these don't return any actual banknotes.

What am I doing wrong? Or does Numista have a major gap in the catalog?

Are you searching United Kingdom, the issuer, or United Kingdom, the section? Modern British notes are issued by either the Bank of England or Scottish and Northern Irish local banks. Numista catalogs them under their country of issue rather than the UK as a whole.

Try this search.

Thank you, that gives me the result I was looking for.

My question now is whether this is a reasonable way to organize the database. A simple text search of “England 5 pounds” gives the result I want while “Britain 5 pounds” does not work. Should somebody (like me) who is not familiar with currency be expected to know that British banknotes are catalogued by the issuing region of the UK instead. Though I do see that searching for “United Kingdom 5 pounds” works, I didn't think of that search earlier. Catalogs like the “Standard Catalog of World Paper Money” use Great Britain as the country, not United Kingdom or England.

To start, I often go to “Catalogue” & then set my filters up for “Banknotes” as default.

The Catalogue page gives me many options (which I ignore) but just check “Issuers” the top left option (flags on the background of the icon button).

Once I hit issuers I get this big screen of all the various national issuers listed. Three columns of nation names are listed alphabetically:

And on the right column is “United Kingdom” (where England sits below):

Once you've done this a few times you can just type in England & “5” on the “Search Query” and you should get a list for all the Five Pound notes including your 5'er. (there's probably faster ways to do this but I don't mind the wait).

I think more of nations than national issuers. I'll keep issuers in mind for future searches as I learn more about currency.

Without getting too complicated, there is a difference between the UK, Great Britain and the constituent countries/principalities.

When it comes to the banknotes the Bank of England issues the banknotes for the UK, several banks are allowed by history to issue their own banknotes in Scotland and Northern Ireland but are not actually considered legal tender but in a legal currency in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scottish & Northern Irish banknotes are not generally accepted in England and legally don't have to be.