Royal Mint

• 1. Introduction

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  The Royal Mint has been striking coins for Britain for well over a thousand years, and yet in 2024 it minted none at all for domestic circulation. That first coinless year in its history speaks to a profound transformation underway at an institution that once occupied a corner of the Tower of London and now operates from a 38-acre plant in a small Welsh town called Llantrisant. How does a mint that produces around two billion coins a year for general use find itself reinventing its business in precious metals, recycled gold from old laptops, and a jewellery boutique in Burlington Arcade? And how did it survive civil wars, Nazi forgery campaigns, and two proposals to sell it off? Those questions run through the Royal Mint's story from its earliest recorded days to the present.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Celtic tribes crossing the English Channel introduced the first coins to Britain around the second century BC. Kentish peoples such as the Cantii were among the first to mint locally, copying coins from Marseille by casting rather than hammering, a practice dated to around 80-60 BC. Roman invaders arriving in AD 43 brought their own mints and ran them for some 40 years before closing. A brief revival in London in 383 ended as Roman rule collapsed, and for the next two centuries no coins appear to have been struck anywhere in Britain. By 650, however, as English kingdoms began to consolidate, records show as many as 30 mints operating across the island. That dispersed, fragmented production continued for more than six hundred years until 1279, when the country's numerous mints were unified under a single system and control was pulled into the mint within the Tower of London. Financial records from that Tower mint, preserved in pipe rolls, show an expenditure of £729 17s d and detail purchases of timber for workshops, giving a rare glimpse into the medieval institution's daily practicalities.

• 3. Civil War and the Milled Coin

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  In 1630, England signed a treaty with Spain that guaranteed a steady flow of silver bullion into the Tower mint, and an additional branch was established at Aberystwyth Castle in Wales. Twelve years later that relative stability shattered. Parliament seized the Tower mint in 1642, and Charles I, forced to flee London after attempting to arrest the Five Members, scattered at least 16 emergency mints across the British Isles, from Carlisle to Cork to Edinburgh to York. Mining engineer Thomas Bushell, owner of both a mint and a silver mine at Aberystwyth, was called upon to move his operations first to Shrewsbury and then to Oxford, where the new mint opened on the 15th of December 1642 in New Inn Hall, now the site of St Peter's College. Bushell worked alongside engravers Nicholas Briot, Thomas Rawlins, and Nicholas Burghers, the last of whom was appointed Graver of Seals, Stamps, and Medals in 1643. When Bristol Castle fell to parliamentary forces on the 11th of September 1645, Bushell's role in the civil war mints effectively ended.

  The war also forced a confrontation with an older problem: outdated minting technology. French engineer Peter Blondeau, who had worked at the Paris Mint where hammer-struck coins had been banned since 1639, arrived in London in 1649 invited by the new Commonwealth government. He began testing milled coinage at Drury House in May 1651, producing pattern pieces in silver. The experiment stalled when rival moneyers clung to the old hammering method, and after Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and the Commonwealth collapsed, Blondeau returned to France. It was only in 1662, under the restored Charles II, that Blondeau was recalled and a permanent machine-made coinage was finally established. To combat persistent counterfeiting and clipping, the text "Decus et tutamen" was added to coin rims.

• 4. Newton, Recoinage, and Empire

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  Under the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, Isaac Newton became the mint's warden in 1696. The role was intended as a comfortable sinecure, but Newton treated it as a serious office and threw himself into fighting counterfeiting. By that point, forgeries made up 10% of the country's circulating coins, clipping was widespread, and the silver content of many coins had risen above their face value. King William III responded with the Great Recoinage of 1696, pulling all coins from circulation and enacting the Coin Act 1696, which made it high treason to possess counterfeiting equipment. Satellite mints were established in Bristol, Chester, Exeter, Norwich, and York to handle the volume. When the Acts of Union 1707 united England and Scotland, London absorbed production of Scotland's currency and the Edinburgh mint closed on the 4th of August 1710.

  As Britain's empire expanded, so did demand for coinage. The 1851 Australian gold rush created an illegal gold trade threatening the economy of New South Wales, and in 1853 Queen Victoria issued an Order in Council establishing the Sydney Branch of the Royal Mint. It opened in 1855 on Macquarie Street within the southern wing of Sydney Hospital. Assayer's notes from the 29th of October 1855 record that the mint's Bullion Office had purchased 14,000 ozt of unrefined gold in a single week, and overall coin output averaged over £1,000,000 yearly in its first five years. The success of Sydney led to branches in Melbourne, which opened on the 2nd of June 1872, and Perth, which opened on the 20th of June 1899. A branch in Mumbai opened on the 21st of December 1917 as a wartime measure, striking sovereigns from the 15th of August 1918 until the 22nd of April 1919 before closing the following May. A sixth overseas branch opened in Pretoria on the 1st of January 1923 and produced £83,114,575 worth of sovereigns before closing on the 30th of June 1941.

• 5. Tower Hill and Its Troubles

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  Construction of a purpose-built mint on Tower Hill began in 1805 and was finished by 1809. The Johnson Smirke Building, named for designer James Johnson and builder Robert Smirke, faced the front of the site. Its construction was supervised by architect John Lidbury Poole, father of the singer Elizabeth Poole. By 1856, the mint was producing coins with irregularities in fineness and weight, and Prime Minister Lord Palmerston's administration threatened to break it up unless standards improved. Master of the Mint Thomas Graham sought help from German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who recommended his student George Frederick Ansell. A letter to the Treasury dated the 29th of October 1856 put Ansell forward, and he was appointed as a temporary clerk on the 12th of November 1856 at £120 a year.

  Ansell found weighing practices wildly loose. Gold was being recorded to the nearest pennyweight, meaning small but real losses accumulated with every delivery. On one occasion he delivered 7,920.00 oz of gold that was officially weighed at 7,918.15 oz. A second weighing returned 7,919.98 oz, showing the first official measurement had been off by 960 grains. He pushed through more precise scales made by Messrs. De Grave, Short, and Fanner, winners of an 1862 International Exhibition prize for balance work. In 1859, Ansell's chemistry background enabled the mint to salvage a batch of gold that had been rejected as too brittle, ultimately producing 167,539 gold sovereigns from it. But when a second case of inferior gold coins, totalling £500,000 worth, caused a dispute over whether to re-melt them, Ansell found himself at odds with senior mint chiefs and was removed from his position.

• 6. War, Survival, and the Move to Wales

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  During World War II the Royal Mint took on an almost impossible workload. Under Operation Bernhard, the Nazis flooded Britain with forged banknotes, causing the Bank of England to halt the issue of notes of £10 and above. To compensate, the mint doubled its output until by 1943 it was striking around 700 million coins a year, all while under the threat of bombing. Deputy Master John Craig reinforced the mint's basement as an air-raid shelter, added emergency water supplies, and for the first time in the institution's history hired women. In December 1940, three members of staff were killed in an air raid. An auxiliary mint was set up at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, requisitioned for the war effort, beginning production in June 1941. The Royal Mint was knocked out of commission for three weeks at one point during the conflict.

  On the 1st of March 1966, the government announced plans to decimalise the currency, setting Decimal Day for 1971. The Tower Hill site had been cramped for decades. As far back as 1870, Deputy Master Charles Fremantle had recommended a move in his first annual report. More than 20 sites were considered, including options in Scotland and Northern Ireland, before the small Welsh town of Llantrisant, 10 miles northwest of Cardiff, was chosen. Work began in August 1967. On the 17th of December 1968, the first phase of the new mint was formally opened in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, and Prince Charles. The final cost for land, buildings, and plant came to £8 million. The last coin struck in London was a gold sovereign, minted in November 1975.

• 7. From Trading Fund to Today

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  After relocating, the mint struggled through the deep recession of the early 1970s and was converted to a trading fund on the 1st of April 1975, requiring it to become self-financing. That shift worked. By April 1990 it had become an Executive Agency, but by 2001 it posted its first annual loss, attributed to winning only 5% of new euro coin production rather than the projected 20%. The mint experimented with a Royal Mint Classics range of collectibles that included a hip flask with an embedded £2 coin and a Wedgwood plate featuring Britannia, before abandoning that direction in 2007 to refocus on coins.

  The 2008 financial crisis brought new pressure. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling proposed in his 2009 pre-budget report exploring "the potential benefits of alternative future models for the Royal Mint." His budget recommended making it a company with a view to eventual sale. Unions called it a "selling off the family silver." Chief executive Andrew Stafford took the opposite view, saying it would secure the business's future. On the 31st of December 2009, rather than full privatisation, the mint became Royal Mint Ltd, still wholly owned by HM Treasury. It pays an annual dividend of £4 million to the Treasury, reinvesting remaining profits. In February 2020, the mint listed its first financial product, the Royal Mint Physical Gold ETF on the London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse, backed 100% by the London Bullion Market Association responsible sourcing programme.

  In 2022, the mint launched 886 by The Royal Mint, a luxury jewellery line named for its symbolic founding date, selling from a shop in Burlington Arcade and using gold recovered from electronic waste. That same year it announced a new Precious Metals Recovery facility in South Wales, using patented chemistry from Canadian clean tech company Excir to extract gold from printed circuit boards in minutes at room temperature. With roughly 28 billion sterling coins estimated to be in circulation and around two billion struck annually, the institution that started as a Celtic casting operation now recovers gold from the circuit boards of old televisions and mobile phones.

• 8. The Trial of the Pyx

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  Since the 12th century, newly minted British coins have been subjected to a formal legal test known as the Trial of the Pyx. The ceremony's form has remained essentially unchanged since 1282. A judge presides, and a jury composed of freemen of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths assays sample coins to verify they meet the standards set by the relevant Coinage Acts. Since 1871, the trials have been held at the livery hall of that same Company; before that, they took place at the Palace of Westminster. The word "pyx" refers to the boxwood chest, from the Greek word for a box made of boxwood, in which coins are placed for presentation to the jury. A related Pyx Chapel in Westminster Abbey once served as secure storage for that chest.

  The procedure is no mere formality. Throughout the year, the Deputy Master of the Mint must randomly set aside a fixed proportion of coins from regular production: one bimetallic coin for every 5,000 issued, but one silver Maundy coin for every 150. Given modern production methods, failures are unlikely, though in earlier centuries the temptation for a Master of the Mint to skim precious metals from the process was real enough that the independent check was genuinely load-bearing. The Royal Mint Advisory Committee, established in 1922 with the approval of George V to raise the standard of numismatic and medallic art, operates alongside the Pyx process, reviewing proposed coin designs and providing recommendations to the government and the monarch.