It’s such a beautiful day today (if only it had been yesterday) that I decided to take my still new bicycle out on a spin to Hackney Wick.  I had been tipped off (see Comments) that Simon Goode who runs the London Centre for Book Arts had produced a pamphlet on the industrial history of Hackney Wick or, as he calls it more properly, Old Ford. 

He kindly supplied me with one of the last remaining copies, located in a cupboard.

I half knew, but only half, that Old Ford conceals a rich industrial history, including, from the south, John Kidd and Co., who manufactured printing ink on a site previously occupied by a seventeenth-century dye-works (‘Bow dye’); H.W. Caslon & Co. which inherited the business first established by William Caslon, the great eighteenth-century typographer:-

and the Britannia Folding Box Company, which made cardboard boxes until it went out of business in 1973.  The building then housed Percy Dalton’s Famous Peanut Company until the London Centre for Book Arts took it on in October 2012:-