This business was started in the 1920s by brothers Coleman and Gabriel Zmidek, who had arrived in the UK from Poland shortly after the First World War and changed their surname to Smith. They were ‘fancy cardboard makers’: manufacturers of cardboard packaging including for cigarette boxes and record covers. The building behind the main one, in Burwell Road E10, was a company they also ran called British Celilynd, which experimented with new processes
for laminating the packaging. The photographs above were taken in 1959, and the buildings were later used by a variety of businesses before being demolished to make way for the ‘Motion’ housing development in 2016.
Shortly before the buildings were demolished, Lucy Harrison made the film below about the businesses who were there in 2016: