I was at the Royal Mint recently and, perhaps inevitably given what I do for a living, I found myself looking at it as a story of change. And it is quite a story.
The Royal Mint is a particularly good example because its history stretches back more than 1,100 years. Its story is a succession of responses to changing circumstances.
For around 500 years, from 1279, the Mint operated inside the Tower of London. It was secure, which mattered when your raw materials were precious metals and your product was the country's money. But technology advanced, production increased and eventually the Tower became too cramped for the work. The Mint moved nearby to purpose-built premises at Tower Hill, fully operational by 1812 and equipped with steam-powered machinery.
Then its reach changed.
The modern gold Sovereign, introduced in 1817, became extraordinarily trusted internationally. By the 1880s it was known as the"chief coin of the world". It was legal tender in at least 36 British colonies and dependencies, but was also accepted in countries including Brazil, Egypt and Portugal. Reliability, accuracy and consistent production standards gave a British coin usefulness far beyond Britain.
Then the world changed.
During the world wars, the Mint did not only have to keep producing currency. It became part of the war effort. During the Second World War it undertook munitions work, continued producing coins and medals, coped with bombing and employed women on the factory floor for the first time.
Then the way we counted money changed: decimalisation was introduced.
Britain was replacing pounds, shillings and pence, with their 240 pennies to the pound, with a system of 100 pence to the pound. That meant producing new coins on an extraordinary scale. The existing Tower Hill operation was no longer sufficient, so a new Mint was established at Llantrisant in South Wales. It opened in 1968 and produced much of the enormous stockpile required for Decimal Day on 15th February 1971. Coin production in London subsequently wound down, with the final coin struck at Tower Hill in 1975.
And even the apparently simple question of what form money should take kept changing.
By 1980, inflation and heavy use meant the £1 banknote lasted only around nine months on average. A coin could last 40 years or more. So the government announced its replacement and the first modern £1 coin entered circulation on 21st April 1983.
Then something more fundamental changed: our use of physical money began to decline.
When I visited the Royal Mint, the guides talked about the reduction in coin production as more of the money we use moves electronically. This time, it isn't simply a question of producing different coins. The need for the Mint's traditional product is changing.
Its response has been to look again at what it has besides coin production: centuries of knowledge about precious metals, craftsmanship, design and precision manufacturing.
The Royal Mint opened its visitor experience in Llantrisant in 2016, turning some of its history, knowledge and craft into an experience people could buy and visit. More radically, it has begun finding entirely new uses for expertise that was built around coins and precious metals.
In 2022, it launched 886 by The Royal Mint, a jewellery and homeware business named after the approximate date of the Mint's origins. The new business applies skills associated with coin and medal-making to a different market. The Mint itself describes the move as part of"reinvent[ing] the business for the future" and preserving the skills of its craftspeople. It combines traditional metalworking skills with a new source of raw material: precious metals recovered from electronic waste.
That development has gone considerably further. The Mint opened its Reformation Metals facility in South Wales in August 2024, using technology to extract gold and other precious metals from discarded circuit boards. Recovered gold is now used in its jewellery.
Such an interesting story of change.
The thread running through its history is re-using capability.
Secure handling of valuable materials. Precision manufacturing. Metalworking. Design. Trust. The ability to produce consistently at scale.
What those capabilities are used for has changed repeatedly.
Transformation, viewed over a long enough period, doesn't necessarily mean abandoning what you were good at. Sometimes it means understanding what you are actually good at, beneath the particular product, process or business model in which that capability happens to be expressed today.
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