Salisbury City Council is expected to spend up to £30,000 on the delivery of anniversary medals for the city’s 800th anniversary.
The plans were confirmed in a council meeting last Monday, which saw councillors back the decision to give every child living in Salisbury a medal.
This will include roughly 7,250 children aged from nine months to 8 years in the parish area from all local nurseries, pre-schools, infant, junior, primary, and secondary schools.
Requiring funds of up to £30,000 from the local authority’s general reserve, the move is intended to honour the city’s arrival at the 800-year mark since King Henry III granted Salisbury its Royal Charter.
A document from the meeting outlines that ‘Salisbury has a rich heritage of localized minting dating back to the 17th-century "Salisbury Trade Tokens", which this anniversary initiative seeks to honour’.
It adds ‘this council believes that […] every local child, from early years through to secondary education, should receive a tangible, lifelong keepsake of this historic 800th charter milestone’, arguing that giving out ‘non-legal-tender souvenir token[s]’ is ‘highly effective for community engagement’.
However, some councillors have reportedly expressed concerns about the sustainability of the scheme and whether the £30,000 spend for this purpose would be wasteful.
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