Qualla: Royal Mint

Royal Mint: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MichiganCharms, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 17 December 1968 the Queen pressed a button and the first coin struck at the new Royal Mint in Llantrisant - a ten-pence piece, decimal currency three years before Britain switched - dropped into a tray. The Welsh nationalists who had been expected to protest the visit because of the upcoming Investiture of Prince Charles did not appear. The Mint had spent eight hundred and eighty-two years inside the Tower of London or beside it; it would never go back. The reason for the move was prosaic: Britain was about to decimalise its currency, every coin in the country had to be replaced within a few years, and the cramped site on Tower Hill could not produce enough new coinage fast enough. The reason it ended up in Llantrisant - a small market town in Glamorgan, ten miles northwest of Cardiff - was that the government wanted the work in Wales.

Read more: Royal Mint on Qualla

Image: MichiganCharms | CC BY-SA 3.0

Royal Mint: Twelve Hundred Years of Coining

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Rosser1954 at English Wikipedia. (Original text: Rosser1954 - Roger Griffith), Public domain. The Mint dates itself from 886, the year Alfred the Great struck pennies bearing his title Rex Anglorum - king of the English. There had been earlier coinages in Britain - Celtic imitations of Greek originals in the second century BC, Roman mints active in London and Camulodunum ...

Read more: Royal Mint on Qualla

Image: The original uploader was Rosser1954 at English Wikipedia. (Original text: Rosser1954 - Roger Griffith) | Public domain

Royal Mint: Tower Hill and the Great Recoinage

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Wyon / Royal Mint, CC0. By the early nineteenth century the Mint had outgrown its medieval quarters. Construction began in 1805 on a purpose-built site at Tower Hill, just outside the Tower's western walls, designed by James Johnson and built by Robert Smirke. The keys of the old mint were ceremoniously...

Read more: Royal Mint on Qualla

Image: William Wyon / Royal Mint | CC0

Royal Mint: Why Wales

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wenceslaus Hollar, Public domain. Decimal Day was set for 15 February 1971. The country needed billions of new coins to replace the pre-decimal coinage - shillings, sixpences, half-crowns - that had been struck for centuries. The cramped Tower Hill site could not do it. Over twenty alternative locations were cons...

Read more: Royal Mint on Qualla

Image: Wenceslaus Hollar | Public domain

Royal Mint: Llantrisant Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benedetto Pistrucci, CC0. The new Mint sits on a 38-acre site about ten miles northwest of Cardiff, accessible from junction 34 of the M4. From the road it looks much like any industrial estate - low brick buildings, security fences, lorries coming and going. Inside, the work is unlike any other in Britai...

Read more: Royal Mint on Qualla

Image: Benedetto Pistrucci | CC0

Royal Mint: The Coin in Your Pocket

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FruitMonkey (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Every coin in the United Kingdom - every penny, every fifty-pence piece, every pound - was struck in Llantrisant. The country's small change is made on the western edge of the South Wales coalfield, on a site that thirty years before the Mint arrived was farmland. The new Mint ha...

Read more: Royal Mint on Qualla

Image: FruitMonkey (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0