The Round Oak Steelworks was a steel production plant in Brierley Hill, West Midlands (formerly Staffordshire), England.

It was founded in 1857 by Lord Ward, who later became, in 1860, The 1st Earl of Dudley, as an outlet for pig iron made in the nearby blast furnaces.

The Ward family, Lords of Dudley Castle, came to own and control a wide range of industrial concerns in the Black Country of the nineteenth century.

In 1890, the Dudley Estate sold the iron works to a new public company, which would aim to convert to steel production.

[4] The company passed to the Lancashire Trust and Mortgage Insurance Corporation Limited, which floated the shares in the firm to the public, receiving £135,000.

The Bertrand-Thiel process of making steel was being used at the works.The works prospered until just after the First World War when the firm faced a financial crisis due to a national depression combined with weaknesses at the plant itself[4] It was the Earl's son, the then Viscount Ednam, who tackled the problems by taking specialist financial advice.

Principal products included alloy and carbon steel bars (case hardening, bright drawing, free cutting, machining, hot and cold forging), special sections, railway bearing plates, rounds, squares, flats, angles, channels, joists, billets, blooms, slabs and large forging ingots.

By the late 1970s, jobs were being axed at the plant, which had employed around 2,500 people at its peak, and British Steel was planning to close it down completely.

The closure came in spite of a fierce argument by local Conservative MP John Blackburn that the plant was still profitable and should be retained.

[15] Demolition work took place during 1984, when the land purchased by Don and Roy Richardson, who in October that year were given the go-ahead to build a shopping complex on nearby farmland.

In October 1984, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council approved the plans of local twin brothers Don and Roy Richardson to build a retail park and shopping mall on the farmland.

Merry Hill brought thousands of jobs to the local area and spearheaded a region-wide transition from manufacturing to services as the key employer of local workers, although many of the new shopping centre's jobs were occupied by people who had worked in other locations - mostly Dudley town centre = until the retailers decided to relocate to new units at Merry Hill.