Marshfield Works fired up its furnaces in 1863 the opposite side of the Old Lodge works on Station Road. It was built to produce sheet iron for sale to tinplate works in south Wales and to works in Birmingham. The names Marshfield and Lakefield are reminders of how wet this low-lying pasture land once was.
In 1868 Marshfield Works added a tinplate making department to use some of the iron sheets it produced. Both works experienced problems in the economic depression of the 1870s. Old Lodge Works closed in 1876 and when Marshfield Works changed ownership in 1879 it was renamed the Western Works. Two attempts in the 1880s to reopen Old Lodge Works failed within a short time. Finally, the works was converted into a tinplate works in 1889.
For fifty years, visitors to Llanelli arriving by train travelled up Station Road, flanked by these two tinplate works. Locomotives shunted wagons of steel bars and vans of tinplate across the road and from the pavement a glimpse could be seen of the rolling mills. Visitors knew they had arrived in Tinopolis!
Over seventy old tinplate works across south Wales closed when strip mills and electrolytic tinning arrived in Britain from the USA. Marshfield works closed in 1953 when Trostre opened.
Marshfield works was redeveloped for housing in the 1950s and today one would never guess that Station Road was once a centre of the tinplate industry were it not for a couple of commemorative blue plaques.