William Ward, Lord Ward of Birmingham, was about to become the 1st Earl of Dudley when he commissioned his estate's mineral agent Richard Smith to build the Round Oak Iron Works in 1855. The Ward family had been Lords of Dudley Castle for generations and owned much of the Black Country's coal and ironstone beneath the surface. They needed somewhere to turn their pig iron into something more valuable. The site at Brierley Hill was perfect: next to the Dudley Canal and on two railway lines, including the Earl's own private mineral railway, the Pensnett. Production began in 1857 with 600 men, 28 puddling furnaces and five rolling mills. By 1862 the works was good enough to win a Prize Medal at the International Exhibition in London. Within the radius of 32 kilometres around Round Oak, in those years, more iron was being made than anywhere else on the planet.

Steel finally arrived at Round Oak in August 1894, decades after the Bessemer revolution had begun. The company immediately went bankrupt and the Dudley Estate took the works back. By 1904 it was producing high-class bar iron, chain, and Siemens-Martin open-hearth steel using the Bertrand-Thiel process. Five open-hearth furnaces stood in that immense long shop. The works prospered through the First World War making steel for the war effort, then crashed with the post-war depression. The company reorganised, renamed itself Round Oak Steel Works Limited in December 1936, and survived. After the Second World War a four-million-pound modernisation reshaped the plant. It was nationalised in 1951, sold to Tube Investments in 1953 for 1.4 million pounds, and nationalised again in 1967, becoming part of British Steel while Tube Investments stayed on as co-managers. Through every change of ownership the men kept making steel. At its peak, around 3,000 people worked here.

The 1970s were brutal to British heavy industry. Round Oak's workforce shrank, output fell, and in the late 1970s British Steel began to plan a complete shutdown. On 23 December 1982, two days before Christmas, the works closed. More than 1,200 people lost their jobs. The MP for Dudley raised the matter in the Commons that month, but the decision was made. For three generations in some Brierley Hill families, working at the Oak had been what fathers and sons did. The skill of an open-hearth steelmaker, the timing of when to tap a furnace, the reading of slag colour, the knowledge of which way a billet would behave when it hit the rolls: all of that was now redundant. The plant was demolished in 1984. Some of the men found work; many did not. The local economy of the West Midlands has not fully recovered from the 1980s steel and coal closures even four decades later.

In 1980 the Government had designated the farmland next to Round Oak as an Enterprise Zone, which meant tax breaks and looser planning rules for whoever could build there. After the demolition the zone was extended to cover the steelworks site itself. The local Richardson twins, Don and Roy, businessmen who had grown up in the Black Country, got Dudley council approval in October 1984 to build a shopping mall. The first units of Merry Hill opened in autumn 1985, the first phase was complete by April 1986, and the final phase opened in November 1989. It became one of the largest shopping centres in Europe. The transition was complete: the Black Country, which had invented the industrial mall in 1855, now hosted one of the prototypes of a different kind of mall. Thousands of new jobs, mostly part-time and lower-paid than the steelworker jobs, came in. Many of them were people who had already been working in Dudley town centre and simply relocated. The Waterfront, an office and leisure development on the actual steelworks site, opened in December 1990.

There is almost nothing left of the works. The Dudley Canal is still there, threading past the Waterfront pubs. The railway has a steel terminal, opened in August 1986, where rolled steel from elsewhere is delivered for distribution: a small ghost of the trade that once defined the place. Aerial photographs from the 1970s, juxtaposed with today's satellite views, show a complete inversion. Where the open-hearth shop stood, a multiplex. Where the slag heaps rose, parking lots. Where the pig-iron yards opened off the canal, an Asda. A canalside block of glass-and-brick offices, hard against a former canal basin, occupies the spot where the iron once arrived from the New Level Furnaces. The Depeche Mode album cover, with its industrial sky and silhouetted stacks, is one of the few aesthetic records of what the place looked like in its last working months. After 125 years of fire, the Brierley Hill skyline is bright with retail signage.