Birmingham Mint

The Birmingham Mint sits in the city’s Jewellery Quarter, a red-brick factory built in 1862 on Icknield Street. It was once the world’s largest privately owned coining mint, turning out coins for France, Italy, China and much of the British Empire in the 19th century. The company began in 1817 as a brass-fittings maker before buying the defunct Soho Mint’s presses and gaining government permission to strike foreign coins. By the 1860s it had outgrown its original Shadwell Street site and moved into the new three-storey works. At its peak the firm built minting facilities worldwide and supplied planchets to the Royal Mint itself. The mint’s importance is measured in the millions of coins it produced. In 1853 it struck nine million copper centavos and half-centavos for Chile, its first circulating coins. Five years later it refurbished Marseille’s mint, turning out over 101 million French centimes. Orders from India, Hong Kong, Romania and newly unified Italy followed, each running to tens of millions of pieces. The works also designed and exported lever presses, supplying Burma’s Mandalay mint with 1,200 dies and equipment in 1865. Ralph Heaton II led these ventures until his death in 1862, when his son Ralph Heaton III took charge and modernised production. Inside the factory visitors see the original 1862 layout with its eleven screw presses and one lever press still in place. The red-brick walls enclose the machine shop where dies were cut and presses tested for overseas orders. The yard where planchets were stacked survives alongside the engine house that powered the works. Outside, the Jewellery Quarter’s quiet streets contrast with the building’s former roar of steam and metal. The site stands as a reminder of Birmingham’s once-dominant role in global coin production.