This week, a decade of desertion had clearly taken its toll on the Royal Mint Court, a 2.2 hectare site of old courtyards and buildings, east of the City of London’s financial district.
Wildly overgrown ivy had scaled the attractive brick walls of the grounds, across a busy junction from the Tower of London. The windows of the grand old 19th century Johnson Smirke building, which once housed the mint, were all boarded up.
The formerly landscaped grounds were neglected beneath a carpet of fallen leaves. The door hung off an abandoned security hut at the entrance. Graffiti disfigured the 1980s blocks at the rear of the site. Street detritus had accrued at the shuttered doorways.
A tattered sign remained stuck on one side gate.
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Dated February 2021, it is from builders apologising to locals for noise and disruption from pre-construction clearance works at the site. The sign promised respect for the historic old mint complex.
“As a close local neighbour, we wanted to reassure you,” it reads.
The note was signed by Manchester-based BCEGI Construction (UK): the British arm of Beijing Construction Engineering Group, the Chinese government’s in-house builders.
BCEGI now has the official go-ahead to turn the sprawling Royal Mint Court into a huge new Chinese embassy, following a politically controversial decision this week by the British government, which is keen to rebuild relations with the Asian superpower.
[ UK approves China plan for its largest embassy in Europe despite espionage fearsOpens in new window ]
It is believed the embassy decision has paved the way for an imminent visit to China by Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, who is keen to develop trade links to buttress the UK’s flaccid economy.
Westminster’s China hawks, however, fear that as well as being Europe’s biggest embassy, the Royal Mint Court is now also destined to become its biggest spy nest.
After a seven-year planning battle, China’s only remaining obstacle for the proposed new embassy is a legal challenge by local residents in 100 flats at the back of the site.
They want supporters to “save us from the mega embassy”, which they argue makes the area a future target for protests and possible terrorist attacks. The Chinese also own the freehold to their leased homes, leading some to fear they could be made homeless.
“We face living under the shadow of a hostile superpower,” said local campaigner Mark Nygate in a fundraising note to supporters.
“We are now launching a judicial review to change the law and stop this injustice ... The Chinese ambassador is our landlord ... This embassy is a fortress. It is not a normal embassy building.”
In 12 hours on Tuesday after the UK government gave the project a green light, residents raised £100,000 online to reach their £145,000 legal fund target.
“We won’t waste a single penny in ensuring that this embassy plan crashes on the solid rock of our judicial system,” said Nygate.
In Westminster, the Tories, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats all oppose the plan.
Nigel Farage’s Reform called it a “serious threat to national security” and a “desperate attempt by the Labour government to cosy up to the Chinese Communist Party”.
The new embassy’s basement will run close to fibre-optic cables carrying sensitive financial data from the City to Canary Wharf. Last week, the Daily Telegraph published what it said were plans for 208 “secret” rooms in the basement, feet from the cables.
Even the US government weighed in to express concerns about risks to the data of Wall Street’s giant banks, risking a further fraying of the UK-US “special relationship” that was already severely tested this week by Donald Trump’s demands to take over Greenland.
“The Government have capitulated to Chinese demands,” said Chris Philp, the Conservative MP who is the shadow home secretary. “China is spying on us. It is subverting our democracy, it is repressing people on our soil and it is stealing our technology ... Giving them what they want is simply the wrong thing to do.”
The UK government, however, says it has assessed all the risks as manageable. On Friday, the Chinese were also adamant that the embassy project would go ahead.
“Providing support and convenience for the construction of diplomatic premises is an international obligation of host countries,” said the existing Chinese embassy in London, in a statement to The Irish Times.
“The planning proposal of the new Chinese embassy project is of high quality. The application and its approval are fully in line with international diplomatic practice as well as local legal regulations and procedures.”
China had previously threatened vague “consequences” if the British did not approve the plan.
The huge site around an enclosed courtyard housed Britain’s Royal Mint from the 19th century until 1967. In the 1980s, it was redeveloped to add on two modern office blocks to the rear, with former tenants including Deloitte and Barclays bank.
By 2016 it had been abandoned, however, and fell into the hands of George Soros-backed developers who planned a £750 million (€864 million) mixed-use commercial scheme. This week, faded adverts for that scheme were still painted on to the Mint Court’s walls.
In 2018 China approached the developers with an unsolicited buyout bid of £225 million, setting in motion the embassy plan. Boris Johnson was the UK’s foreign secretary at the time and gave diplomatic approval for the site as an embassy.
Westminster China hawks, London-based anti-China dissident groups, such as exiled Hong Kongers and persecuted Chinese Uyghurs, and local residents in St Mary Grace’s Court, all began a noisy campaign of protest and Tory support for the embassy dried up.
An earlier version of the embassy plan was rejected by Tower Hamlets borough council on planning grounds, before a new version was resubmitted. But months after Labour won the July 2024 election, the project was formally “called in” by then deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, who was also the UK’s housing secretary.
The Labour government has courted China assiduously over the past 18 months, but it stalled on the embassy plan throughout 2025 after a public inquiry, buying time for Britain’s intelligence agencies to advise on the risks.
In the meantime, the Chinese applied various forms of diplomatic pressure on the British, who also want to revamp their own premises in Beijing. It was reported that the Chinese had even occasionally shut off the water at the UK embassy in China.
On Tuesday, Rayner’s successor as housing secretary Steve Reed gave his formal approval to the plan, sparking near across-the-board political criticism.
Dan Jarvis, a junior minister in UK government, told the House of Commons that Britain’s security services believed there were actually advantages for the UK, from an intelligence monitoring point of view, in having the Chinese consolidate their existing seven diplomatic buildings in London on to a single site.
It is believed the fibre optic cables will be dug up and moved further away from the embassy building.
The British are now understood to be preparing for a visit to Beijing soon by Starmer to meet Xi Jingping, the Chinese premier.
Local residents behind Royal Mint Court, however, are gearing up for a fight.
“Now, we go to court,” said Nygate.
The residents have hired Charles Banner, a barrister and planning-law specialist and Tory member of the House of Lords.
“We can stand up to both Beijing and Whitehall,” said the residents.
