The Royal Mint is the United Kingdom's official maker of British coins. It is the oldest company in the United Kingdom and is currently located in Llantrisant, Wales, where it moved to in 1968.
Operating under the legal name The Royal Mint Limited, it is a limited company that is wholly owned by His Majesty's Treasury and is under an exclusive contract to supply the nation's coinage. As well as minting circulating coins for the UK and international markets, The Royal Mint is a leading provider of precious metal products.
The Royal Mint was historically part of a series of mints that became centralised to produce coins for the Kingdom of England, all of Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and nations across the Commonwealth.
The Royal Mint operated within the Tower of London for several hundred years before moving to what is now called Royal Mint Court, where it remained until the 1960s. As Britain followed the rest of the world in decimalising its currency, the Mint moved from London to a new 38-acre (15 ha) plant in Llantrisant, Glamorgan, Wales, where it has remained since.
Since 2018 The Royal Mint has been evolving its business to help offset declining cash use. It has expanded into precious metals investment, historic coins, and luxury collectibles, which saw it deliver an operating profit of £12.7 million in 2020–2021.
In 2022 The Royal Mint announced it was building a new plant in South Wales to recover precious metals from electronic waste. The first of this sustainably sourced gold is already being used in a new jewellery division – 886 by The Royal Mint – named in celebration of its symbolic founding date.
The history of coins in Great Britain can be traced back to the second century BC when they were introduced by Celtic tribes from across the English Channel. The first record of coins being minted in Britain is attributed to Kentish tribes such as the Cantii who around 80–60 BC imitated those of Marseille through casting instead of hammering.
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The silver standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of silver. Silver was far more widespread than gold as the monetary standard worldwide, from the Sumerians 3000 BC until 1873. Following the discovery in the 16th century of large deposits of silver at the Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia, an international silver standard came into existence in conjunction with the Spanish pieces of eight. These silver dollar coins played the role of an international trading currency for nearly four hundred years.
The sovereign is a British gold coin with a nominal value of one pound sterling (£1) and contains 0.2354 troy oz of pure gold. Struck since 1817, it was originally a circulating coin that was accepted in Britain and elsewhere in the world; it is now a bullion coin and is sometimes mounted in jewellery. In addition, circulation strikes and proof examples are often collected for their numismatic value. In most recent years, it has borne the design of Saint George and the Dragon on the reverse; the initials () of the designer, Benedetto Pistrucci, are visible to the right of the date.
The economy of the United Kingdom is a highly developed social market economy. It is the sixth-largest national economy in the world measured by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP), and twenty second-highest by nominal GDP per capita, constituting 3.1% of nominal world GDP. By PPP (purchasing power parity) terms, the UK constitutes 2.3% of world GDP. The United Kingdom has one of the most globalised economies, and comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.