Soho Mint

History

A country awash with fakes

By the 1780s Britain’s small change was a joke. When the Royal Mint sampled halfpennies in 1787, it found only about eight per cent were genuine. Matthew Boulton saw a problem and a market, and his answer was machinery.

He had been striking trade tokens since 1772. In 1786 he made blanks for East India Company coin for Bencoolen in Sumatra, though the coins themselves were struck by hand in London. Now he wanted to do the whole job.

Hidden in the garden

Boulton built his mint in 1788–89. He did not put it in the showpiece factory. Historian George Demidowicz places it “about 110m from the Manufactory’s principal building, hidden deliberately within Boulton’s garden buildings for secrecy”.

What made the Soho Mint new was steam. A Boulton & Watt engine drove the presses. In 1798–99 the Mint was altered so that the presses were driven by vacuum generated by the engine. It is usually called the world’s first steam-powered mint.

The cartwheel

The big prize came in 1797. The government contracted Boulton to strike regal copper coins, and a proclamation of 26 July 1797 made them legal tender up to one shilling. The penny and twopence were huge, heavy coins with a broad raised rim; they became known as “cartwheels”. The Royal Mint Museum records about 44 million pennies and about 720,000 twopences, all dated 1797, each with the word “SOHO” beneath Britannia’s shield.

More regal coin followed in 1805–07, and East India Company work from 1803. The Mint also struck medals and sold complete minting machinery abroad. Soho machinery went to the rebuilt Royal Mint in London, in operation by April 1810, and to mints at Calcutta, Bombay and Mexico.

Coins and conscience

Soho’s customers reached across the empire and beyond, and some orders touched the great moral question of the age. In 1791 the Soho Mint struck coins for the Sierra Leone Company, the settlement founded by abolitionists for free Black people; the design shows a Black hand and a white hand clasped. In 1807 Soho struck a Sierra Leone medal marking the abolition of the British slave trade, inscribed “We are all brethren”. Historian Stephen Mullen, reviewing Boulton’s record for Birmingham Museums Trust in 2021, judges his attitude to slavery “equivocal”: he courted Caribbean planters as engine customers, but also subscribed to Olaudah Equiano’s book and coined for the abolitionists.

Three Boultons and an underground shaft

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

Matthew Boulton ran the Mint until his death in 1809, then his son Matthew Robinson Boulton until 1841, then his grandson Matthew Piers Watt Boulton until 1850. In 1824–26 the son reorganised it radically. An underground drive shaft about 60 metres long carried power to a new cutting-out room in the old crescent-shaped “Latchet Building”, and new equipment was installed in 1828.

The end

The business closed in 1849. On 29 April 1850 the equipment was auctioned. Most of it went to Ralph Heaton, whose firm became the Birmingham Mint in Icknield Street, and to James Watt & Co., who later set up a new mint at the Soho Foundry in Smethwick in 1860. Those are different places from this one. The Soho Mint buildings were demolished, and no trace was left by 1863. Early in the 20th century sand digging destroyed most of what lay underground, including the press room and engine room.

Under the patios

At Easter 1996 Time Team dug in the back gardens of South Road. They found three sections of the brick tunnel that carried the 1824–26 drive shaft, and part of the outside wall of the coin cutting-out room under patio slabs. Demidowicz says the dig “fixed precisely for the first time the location of the Soho Mint”.

Every cartwheel penny that turns up in a Birmingham garden or a coin dealer’s tray still carries the word SOHO. For a place with nothing left to see, that is quite a signature.

What happened here?

Steam-driven presses struck tokens, medals and coins here from 1788–89, including the 1797 cartwheel penny and twopence and coins for the East India Company and the Sierra Leone Company. Complete minting machinery was made for other mints. In 1824–26 it was rebuilt with an underground drive shaft. It closed in 1849 and its equipment was sold in 1850.

Why it disappeared

Industrial decline · Redevelopment

The Mint business closed in 1849 and its equipment was auctioned on 29 April 1850 (Tungate). The buildings were demolished, and no trace of the Mint or the Manufactory was left by 1863. Early-20th-century sand digging destroyed most of the buried remains, including the press room and engine room (Demidowicz). The site was later built over with houses.