Gold Bullion Vault - Periodic Table of Videos - YouTube

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.