NEWSPAPER MONSTER

The presses that rolled under Fleet Street are silent, replaced by the likes of Broxbourne’s mega newsprinting site – the biggest in the world. We go inside to see the ‘nightly miracle’

- Louise McEvoy

It’s a little-known fact that Broxbourne is home to the largest newspaper printing plant in the world, where the majority of the UK’s national newspapers are printed.

The sprawling 40-acre site is part of a £650m investment which saw Newsprinters establish 19 presses at three UK plants – 12 in Broxbourne, five in Liverpool’s Knowsley and two in Glasgow.

Situated just off the A10 and a stone’s throw from the M25, planning permission for the Broxbourne plant was granted in 2005 and took two years to build, going into full production in May 2008. Now 3.35m daily newspapers are printed at the site every weekday, and that’s not to mention weekend papers, supplements and weekly titles.

All three sites are highly automated using state-of-the-art technology and, while the Broxbourne site has more than 350 employees, only a handful of skilled custodians are required to keep a watchful eye on the machinery, should anything go awry.

There are machines for pretty much everything. Every day there are 50 deliveries of blank paper shipped from all over the world, offering different grades and reel sizes, and from the moment the reels arrive, nobody touches them. Floor level conveyor tracks move the huge reels – which can measure up to 2.21 metres in diameter and weigh up to two tonnes – effortlessly to the storage area, before preparation machines unwrap their protective layer prior to the printing process. This uses plates to transfer the layout of digitally designed pages to the paper on vast machines. The whole process is one of rolling movement.

Once the newspapers have been printed, they are sorted into bundles, stacked on pallets and wrapped in cling film – again all by machine.