Royal Mint Court
Based on Wikipedia: Royal Mint Court
In the heart of London, just a stone's throw from the Tower, there's a patch of land that has served as a mass grave for plague victims, a medieval abbey, a naval supply depot, a tobacco warehouse, the birthplace of British currency, and—most recently—the future site of China's new embassy. Royal Mint Court has lived more lives than most countries.
A Graveyard Before It Was Anything Else
The story begins with death. In 1349, the Black Death was tearing through London with such ferocity that the city's churchyards couldn't keep up with the bodies. Desperate for burial space, authorities designated a new cemetery: the Churchyard of the Holy Trinity, right where Royal Mint Court now stands.
Three mass burial trenches were dug. Fourteen rows of individual graves followed. A small chapel was erected to serve the dead and those who mourned them.
When archaeologists excavated the site between 1986 and 1988, they recovered the remains of 762 people—victims of perhaps history's deadliest pandemic, which killed somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of Europe's population. Alongside the bones, they found belt buckles and two hoards of coins, the small personal effects of ordinary Londoners whose lives were cut short by a bacterium they couldn't see and couldn't fight.
The Last Cistercian Abbey in England
Less than a year after the cemetery opened, the land found new purpose. On March 20, 1350, King Edward III granted the site to the Cistercian order of monks. They built the Royal Free Chapel of St Mary Graces on Tower Hill, which eventually grew into the Abbey of St. Mary de Graces.
Londoners had a simpler name for it: Eastminster.
The Cistercians were the white monks, so called for the undyed wool of their habits. They were reformers who sought a stricter, simpler interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict. They built their monasteries in remote places, far from cities and their distractions. Eastminster was an exception—planted in the commercial heart of England's capital.
It was small by monastic standards, designed to house just ten monks and an abbot. It would prove to be the last Cistercian foundation in England before King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in his break with Rome.
In 1538, St Mary Graces was surrendered to the Crown and sold to Sir Arthur Darcy, who tore down part of the monastery and made the rest his home until his death in 1560. Today, the abbey's foundations remain relatively well preserved and visible in the partially open basement of the site—medieval bones beneath modern office space.
Feeding the Navy
After Darcy died, the land returned to Crown ownership and found yet another purpose: feeding sailors.
The Royal Navy needed victualling yards—places where food, drink, and supplies could be stored and prepared for ships heading out to sea. The former monastery became one such yard, supplying the vessels that were building Britain's nascent maritime empire.
For nearly two centuries, from the late 1500s until 1739, the site served this unglamorous but essential function. Then the navy moved to new, larger premises in Deptford, downriver along the Thames. What came next was a brief interlude as a tobacco warehouse, storing the addictive leaves that were flowing into Britain from its American colonies.
Where Britain Made Its Money
The Royal Mint had been operating inside the Tower of London since the thirteenth century. For over five hundred years, every coin that passed through English and later British hands was struck within those ancient walls. But by the early 1800s, the operation had outgrown its medieval quarters.
Between 1806 and 1811, the Mint relocated to its new purpose-built home at Royal Mint Court. The main building, designed by James Johnson and completed by the architect Robert Smirke, was finished by the end of 1809. Smirke would go on to design the British Museum; here, he created something more utilitarian but equally significant—a factory for money.
The new facility was a self-contained world. The main building housed apartments for the Deputy Master of the Mint, the Assay Master (who tested the purity of metals), and the Provost of the Moneyers (who oversaw the actual coin-makers), along with bullion stores and administrative offices. Surrounding it were gatehouses, machinery buildings, and dwelling houses for officers and staff.
A boundary wall encircled everything. Running along the inside of that wall was a narrow alley called the Military Way, constantly patrolled by armed guards. This was, after all, where the nation's gold and silver were stored and transformed into legal tender.
The Rothschilds Move In
In 1848, a royal commission examined the Mint's operations and recommended splitting up its functions. The actual striking of coins would remain a government operation, but the refining of gold—the process of purifying raw gold into the standard required for coinage—could be contracted out to a private company.
Anthony de Rothschild saw opportunity.
The Rothschilds were already the most powerful banking family in Europe. Founded in Frankfurt in the eighteenth century, the family had established branches in London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples, creating what was essentially the first multinational banking network. They had financed governments, funded wars, and built railroads across the continent.
Their connection to gold ran deep. In 1815, the family had famously supplied the Duke of Wellington with gold coins to pay his soldiers before the Battle of Waterloo. A decade later, when a series of English bank failures triggered a run on the Bank of England itself, the Rothschilds used their family connections to rapidly purchase gold from European banks and prop up the British financial system.
On January 26, 1852, Anthony de Rothschild wrote to the Deputy Master of the Mint expressing his readiness to "execute the Lease for the Refinery." On February 3, the deal was done. The Royal Mint Refinery became part of the Rothschild business empire.
The timing could not have been better.
Rivers of Gold
In 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in California, triggering the Gold Rush. Three years later, gold was found in Australia. Suddenly, vast quantities of the precious metal were flowing into London from across the globe.
The Royal Mint Refinery processed it all. By the 1890s, the operation was so profitable that the Rothschilds purchased the freehold—becoming outright owners rather than tenants. They also bought properties on nearby Royal Mint Street to house their workers and families.
In 1894, Alfred de Rothschild acquired a plot of land on Cartwright Street from the Metropolitan Board of Works, with an agreement that it would be maintained as "Artisans Dwellings" to accommodate one hundred workmen at the refinery for at least eighty years. Victorian-era affordable housing, courtesy of one of the world's richest families.
By 1914, the British Empire controlled seventy percent of the world's gold output. The majority of it was shipped to London and refined at the Rothschild facility at Royal Mint Court. It was, in a very literal sense, where the wealth of the empire was processed.
The Slow End of an Era
Operations continued through both World Wars, but the twentieth century was not kind to the old model. By the 1960s, the refinery was no longer economically viable. The copper foil plant was sold in 1965, and two years later the entire business went to Engelhard Industries Limited.
In November 1968, the last Rothschild employee left the refinery and closed the gate on 19 Royal Mint Street. An era spanning more than a century had ended.
The Royal Mint itself hung on a bit longer, but in 1967 it began moving to a new facility in Llantrisant, Wales. Minting ceased at Royal Mint Court entirely in 1975. The Smirke building—the original 1809 structure—continued in use by the Mint until January 2000, when the last operations finally departed.
From Coins to Complexity
What happened next to Royal Mint Court reads less like history and more like a financial thriller.
In the 1980s, the Crown Estate Commissioners redeveloped the site. Two new office buildings were constructed, designed by the architectural firm Sheppard Robson and subsequently named Murray House and Dexter House. These joined the surviving historic buildings—Smirke's 1809 structure and the original gatehouses, both granted Grade II listed status, meaning they were legally protected as buildings of special architectural or historic interest.
One hundred shared-ownership homes were created on the site. These were leasehold properties, meaning their owners purchased long-term leases rather than the land itself. And who was the Superior Landlord, the ultimate owner of the ground beneath those homes? Queen Elizabeth II, through the Crown Estate.
The office space attracted major tenants. Barclays Global Investors paid five million pounds in annual rent. When Barclays left, the space was sublet to Deloitte and Old Mutual.
But beneath these straightforward tenancies, a complex web of financial engineering was being spun.
Mortgages, Securities, and Offshore Structures
The office leases were granted to a company called Gulldale Limited, incorporated in the Isle of Man—a self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea, known for its low taxes and light financial regulation.
Gulldale took out a mortgage on the property, using the rental income as collateral. That mortgage was then bundled together with other commercial property loans and sold to investors as a Commercial Mortgage Backed Security, or CMBS—a financial instrument that had become wildly popular in the years before the 2008 financial crisis.
The specific CMBS was called Equinox Eclipse 2006-1, issued by Barclays Capital. It was part of a four-hundred-one-million-pound offering. The notes were due to mature in January 2018.
Things did not go as planned.
After the financial crisis, the value of the leasehold fell dramatically. When the tenancies expired at the end of 2014, the property sat largely vacant. The securitized loan had an unpaid balance of sixty-nine and a half million pounds. A secondary loan, held by a private individual investor, had fourteen million outstanding—against a total property valuation of less than thirty-two and a half million pounds.
On March 6, 2014, Gulldale Limited was placed into administration—the British equivalent of bankruptcy protection. It became the first company incorporated in the Isle of Man but operating primarily elsewhere to be placed into administration in England.
Enter George Soros
To understand what happened to the freehold—the actual ownership of the land—requires tracking a different set of transactions involving one of the world's most famous investors.
George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire, made his fortune through hedge funds that placed massive bets on currency movements and market trends. In 1992, he famously "broke the Bank of England" by shorting the British pound, reportedly making over a billion dollars in a single day.
By the 1990s, Soros was investing heavily in London property through a complex network of investment vehicles. In 1994, his G Soros Realty Investors acquired shares in British Land. In 1998, one of his Quantum hedge funds—operating from the British Virgin Islands—invested one hundred twenty-seven million pounds into a property company called Delancey Estates.
Delancey became a major player in London real estate. In 2005, The Guardian reported that Soros was buying two billion pounds worth of London property through his investments in the company.
In 2009, the Crown Estate approved the sale of the Royal Mint Court freehold to DV4, a wholly owned subsidiary of Delancey incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. The price was fifty-one million pounds. The sale was to remain confidential until its completion in June 2010.
DV4 later appeared in the Panama Papers, the massive leak of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that revealed how the wealthy use offshore structures to manage their assets.
The China Deal
In 2014, LRC Group paid forty-nine and a half million pounds for the debt secured against the long leasehold title. In 2015, with the site still largely vacant, squatters occupied the buildings in a protest against homelessness.
Delancey's freehold interest gave it power to block new tenants. In 2015, Delancey and LRC agreed to a joint venture to redevelop the site. Planning permission was granted in 2016 for a major transformation: the Grade II-listed buildings would be refurbished, and the site would become a new office, shopping, and leisure complex.
Then came a different buyer altogether.
In May 2018, the site was sold to the People's Republic of China to become the location of their new London embassy. As the new freeholder, the Chinese government became the Superior Landlord over the one hundred leasehold homes on the site—meaning that ordinary British homeowners now had the Chinese state as their ultimate landlord.
David Chipperfield, one of Britain's most celebrated architects, was appointed in 2020 to design the development of the site.
Questions and Controversies
The sale to China raised eyebrows and questions.
On August 31, 2018, Jim Fitzpatrick, then Member of Parliament for Poplar and Canning Town, sent a letter to the Crown Estate making serious allegations. The letter claimed fraud and malfeasance related to the 2010 sale of the freehold to Delancey.
The central question: why had the sale been conducted off-market and kept confidential? Why weren't other potential buyers informed? Organizations known to be seeking freehold commercial property in London at the time—including the City of London Corporation and the ambassadors of both the United States and China—apparently weren't told about the opportunity.
The letter pointed to a Crown Estate document that stated "an exhaustive campaign by our appointed agents, BH2, initially failed to identify a purchaser for this asset." How exhaustive could it have been if major institutional buyers weren't contacted?
Further questions were raised about the earlier financial arrangements. Why had Barclays refinanced the mortgage for Gulldale Limited while simultaneously being a tenant of Gulldale Limited? This created an unusual conflict of interest—the bank was both lender and renter, with interests that might not align.
Layers of History, Layers of Ownership
The legal records for Royal Mint Court tell their own story. A 2018 Land Registry document references a conveyance from 1929 between "The King's Most Excellent Majesty," the Commissioners of the Crown Lands, and two Rothschilds—Lionel Nathan and Anthony Gustav. It specifies which walls and recesses were included or excluded from the transfer, the kind of granular detail that accumulates over centuries of legal transactions.
Another entry references a license from 1962 between "Her Majesty's Postmaster General" and yet more Rothschilds—Edmund Leopold, Leopold David, and Evelyn Robert Adrian—regarding a security fence. The Rothschild family's connection to the site spanned generations.
The Present and Future
Today, Royal Mint Court sits in a kind of limbo. Plans for the Chinese embassy remain in development. The hundred leasehold homes continue to be occupied by their owners, who now answer ultimately to Beijing rather than the Crown.
The site itself is a palimpsest—a document that has been written on, erased, and written over many times. Beneath the modern office buildings lie the foundations of a medieval abbey. Beneath those lie the bones of plague victims, their belt buckles and hoarded coins long since removed to museums and archives.
The Smirke building still stands, its neoclassical facades a reminder of the era when Britain's coins were struck here. The original gatehouses remain, silent witnesses to the armed guards who once patrolled the Military Way.
And through it all, the five and a half acres of land have passed from monks to monarchs, from private entrepreneurs to offshore investment vehicles, and finally to a foreign government. Each transition has left its mark in legal documents and physical structures, in bones beneath the basement and names on property titles.
Royal Mint Court is, in miniature, a history of London itself: commercial, cosmopolitan, constantly reinventing itself, and always slightly mysterious about who really owns what.