The Industrial Revolution and the harnessing of steam power had huge repercussions for the minting of coins but the Royal Mint was not the first to realise this potential. A private mint with steam-powered machinery was opened in Birmingham by the entrepreneur Matthew Boulton which secured major government contracts including one in 1797 for twopences and pennies.

The new coins were of a much higher quality than those being issued from the Tower and a Committee of the Privy Council, established in 1798, quickly concluded that the machinery in the Royal Mint was of an 'ancient and imperfect construction'. With no further space available to accommodate new machinery in the Tower, the decision was taken to construct a purpose-built mint elsewhere.

The new Royal Mint, which began production c. 1810, was built just a few hundred yards away on Tower Hill on the former site of the great Cistercian Abbey of St Mary of Grace. Equipped with steam-powered machinery purchased from Matthew Boulton, the new facility was very much an industrial concern.

The noise in the Coining Press Room was deafening and the buildings trembled with every thud of the two-tonne presses which were capable of striking up to 100 coins a minute.

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, overseas branches of the Royal Mint were opened in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Ottawa, Bombay and Pretoria. These branches were empowered to strike Imperial gold coins and such was their importance that their combined output of sovereigns was virtually as great as that of the Royal Mint itself.

United Kingdom coins circulated in various parts of the Empire and many countries turned to the Royal Mint for the striking of their own distinctive coinages. Following the First World War the Royal Mint started to look further afield, deliberately seeking orders from foreign countries all over the world. By the 1950s and 1960s the Royal Mint had succeeded in capturing a sizeable proportion of the world's export trade in coins.