English: An interim picture shows the modernist system building of the former Yardley box factory, known as Warton House. The electricity cables, between West Ham and Clapton are shortly to disappear, necessitating closure of this busy road at some time.

The initial Yardley business commenced in Carpenters Road in 1903, and this extension was bult in 1937. In 1966, the company moved to Basildon where, I believe, they used ex-BEA AEC half-deck airport coaches as staff transport. If I remember rightly, a huge rose was grafted onto the east end of the building to greet traffic coming into London. The more familiar flowersellers painting ,their trade mark, still graces the west end. Higgins and Thomerson were, according to Pevsner, the architects, also designing the former Trebor Sweets factory in Forest Gate.

A little further east of this site was where the earliest successful porcelain manufacturing business of Britain was sited from about 1750, known as the Bow factory, although it was in Essex, not Bow,which was on the London side of the River Lea,where a forerunner had been in operation in the 1740s. River-borne transport was much easier from this side of Bow bridge.