What the town mark is for
A UK hallmark is a set of marks struck by an assay office after it has tested a piece. The compulsory marks are a sponsor’s mark, showing who submitted the piece; a fineness mark, giving the purity in parts per thousand; and an assay office mark, showing which office tested it. A date letter is no longer compulsory on new work. The assay office mark is the town mark: a leopard’s head for London, an anchor for Birmingham, a rose for Sheffield and a castle for Edinburgh.
So an anchor in a hallmark means one thing: the Birmingham Assay Office tested the metal and struck the mark. It does not mean the piece was made in Birmingham — makers anywhere could submit work to any office — and it says nothing about who made it. That is the sponsor’s mark, usually a pair of initials in a shaped shield.
The four offices still operating
London is the oldest, run by the Goldsmiths’ Company. According to its own history, the leopard’s head was crowned from 1478 and lost the crown in 1822, which makes a crowned head a useful pointer to London silver from before that change.
Birmingham and Sheffield were created together by an Act of May 1773, because makers in both cities had to send work to London to be marked. Sheffield Assay Office’s history tells the story that the two cities’ petitioners met at the Crown and Anchor inn off the Strand, and each took one sign: Birmingham the anchor, Sheffield the crown. Sheffield’s crown was its mark for silver; when it was allowed to mark gold from 1904 it used a rose for gold, and after the Hallmarking Act 1973 the rose became its mark for both metals. A crown on old Sheffield silver is therefore the town mark, not a fineness mark.
Edinburgh, run by the Incorporation of Goldsmiths of the City of Edinburgh, strikes a castle. It has been Scotland’s only assay office since Glasgow’s closed.
Offices that have closed
Glasgow ran a second Scottish office from 1819 to 1964, according to the Edinburgh Assay Office. Chester closed in 1962; its town mark, three wheatsheaves and a sword in a shaped shield, lay dormant until Sheffield Assay Office registered it as a trademark in 2023. Where it appears on new work, it is an additional mark and not a UK hallmark.
Other towns had assay offices in earlier centuries. They are deliberately left off this page: the assay office sources consulted for it do not give their marks or dates, and a town mark matched from a secondary source is exactly the kind of guess this site does not publish.
What this page cannot tell you
It cannot date a piece. Date letters run in cycles that differ between offices, and a letter is only meaningful alongside its typeface and shield shape. Matching one from memory risks misdating a piece by decades, so this site does not offer a date-letter table. The assay offices themselves offer hallmark tracing.
It also cannot tell you whether a mark is genuine. Forged hallmarks exist, and a worn or oddly proportioned town mark is worth a second look. The UK also accepts marks struck under the international Hallmarking Convention, which carry a common control mark in place of a UK town mark.