When he was fifteen his parents placed him in a merchant's office in nearby Rostock, to learn about commerce, and there he made the acquaintance of Christian Allhusen, who in 1827 invited him to move to Newcastle upon Tyne to become his business partner in the corn trade.

[1] After several years in business in the north of England, Bölckow became a naturalised British subject in 1841 by act of Parliament and anglicised his name as "Henry Bolckow".

In 1846 the pair opened Witton Park Ironworks, 20 miles (32 km) to the west of the town, where ironstone from Grosmont, could be smelted in blast furnaces to produce the pig iron for the Vulcan Street works.

[2] The high transport costs generated by this operation led the partners to look closer to home for their raw materials, and in the end they found what they were looking for on their own doorstep.

In 1850, Vaughan and his geologist John Marley discovered large seams of iron ore at Eston, in the nearby Cleveland Hills.

[3] The rapid success of their business enabled them to expand their operations, acquiring coal mines, limestone quarries, brickworks, gasworks and a machine works.

The firm of Bolckow & Vaughan were slow to adapt, mainly because the local iron ore had a high phosphorus content and the original 'acid' Bessemer process required pig-iron low in phosphorus to produce usable steel; thus by the late 1870s the town was suffering a major economic downtown with unemployment running very high.

[7] A statue commemorating Henry Bolckow stands in Middlesbrough's Exchange Square, diagonally opposite the railway station.