In some ways, I think it's quite disappointing
seeing these bars because the gold is an exciting element
it has interesting chemistry
and it's just sitting here doing nothing.
It's enormously impressive, but it's a bit sad
rather like a mausoleum where the
the dead gold is sitting, waiting for people to remember it.
It could be doing exciting reactions and so on.
We're in the vault, the bullion vault at the Bank of England.
I've never seen so much gold.
In fact I've never seen so much of any element.
So we're standing here and each shelf here has got a tonne of gold.
which is worth 35 million pounds at today's price.
Tomorrow it might be worth even more.
It's very secure; we've been through a whole series of security checks.
No money's allowed here, to make sure we don't take anything out.
And so
we're both really excited to be here
so the camera may be shaking with Brady's excitement.
I've never seen large lumps of gold
and to see it all 'round is extraordinary.
One's first reaction is that it can't possibly be real
because normally you don't see such things.
Looks like chocolates in the duty free at the airport
or something like that.
But these really are solid gold bars
and it's quite extraordinary.
There isn't any smell because metals don't smell
and it's very quiet because of the thick walls
to keep it secure.
The weather's been very cold recently
and I was ready to be shivering but it's nice and warm.
But I suppose gold colour also gives you a feeling of warmth
so it may be partly psychological.
The reason why the bank has got this store
is because not only the Bank of England but other central banks
like to keep some of their money reserves in gold
because the price of gold is very stable
or the value of gold compared to the value of currencies
which can go up and down.
And so, every country has a certain proportion of its reserves in gold
and if you look at the statistics, the UK at the moment has about 310 tonnes of gold in its reserves
But there's much more gold here than that
because it belongs to all sorts of people, not just to the Bank of England
This vault is part of a complex of different rooms.
I haven't seen the other rooms
but altogether if you look at the bank's annual report
it's worth 197 billion pounds.
That is 197 thousand million pounds.
And that's quite the serious sum of money.
They, people buy and sell the gold
and each block of gold has its own number
like your car has a registration number.
And when people buy and trade the gold
they don't actually take the bar home
but just that number is transferred from the seller's account to the buyer's account
and the gold just sits here quietly.
Apparently the oldest bar of gold here has been here since 1916.
That's the First World War, nearly 100 years ago.
But the beauty of gold a chemical element
is that it's very unreactive
So it looks just the same now as it did in 1916.
It's hasn't tarnished.
It hasn't got oxide layers on the surface.
It's hasn't started creeping, changing its shape and so on.
So come over here because they've given me two bars that we can look at.
So we've got two different bars of gold
which are both the so-called 'London Good Delivery' bars
which means that their weight is in a certain limit range.
And in fact each of them has its precise weight put on them
in a rather strange unit called a Troy ounce
So this one is 399.100
This one was made in Australia.
And this one apparently came from Switzerland and is slightly heavier: 400.075
I must say this one looks much nicer.
It's polished more and
this one looks a bit like a loaf of bread
but is a rather miserable loaf of bread.
but a pretty fantastic lump of gold.
Now one of the things you know about gold is that it's really heavy
so I'm going to see whether I can actually lift this with one hand.
And I can sort of lift it
but not easily.
Two hands is quite easy.
So this weighs, each of these in more understandable units, weighs
something like 12.4 kilos or 28 pounds.
So for those of you who use imperial units, that's two stone
Each of these is worth about 435 thousand pounds.
You could buy two quite nice houses for a block like this.
Or for a whole shelf of these, which contains a tonne
you could buy 137 of the upmarket Rolls Royce cars
so take your choice.
These blocks are a bit like bricks
and if you took all the gold that had ever been mined
and put them together like a construction kit to make a big block
you would end up with a block that was 20 metres cubed.
That's 60 feet on each side.
Which would easily fit, for example, under the legs of the Eiffel Tower.
It woudln't look all that big
just as a building on the street.
And that's all the gold there ever has been.
I did a little calculation on the way here
that I weigh about the same as six of these bars of gold
which means that if I were worth my weight in gold
I'd be worth a bit over two and a half million pounds.
I was a bit disappointed.
Thought I might be worth more, but still...
So not only would all the gold ever mined fit here under the legs of the Eiffel Tower
it'd fit here quite easily.
By my reckoning that cube of about 20 metres in each direction
would probably fit three times from there
to over there.
Same for each side.
And you could probably stack it on top a few times as well.
So not that much gold.
Now we actually filmed a bit more in the vault we haven't used.
So stay tuned, we might use that soon.
In the meantime we've made plenty of other films about gold.
We've evaporated it,
we've dissolved it.
You can check them out also.