Broxbourne Printworks Tour

So (as I mentioned before) the other day, the office sent some of us on a little trip to see where newspapers are printed! The scale of the place is absolutely astonishing (a glimpse down one of the corridors gives you a clue) -

- suffice it to say this place is the biggest manufacturing plant in Europe (roughly the size of 23 football pitches, the amount of steel involved could have been used to build two Eiffel towers and there is enough cabling inside to circle the rings of Saturn - only once though ;) -


The whole place is completely automated, from the minute these huge reels of paper arrive on their delivery trucks there is almost no interaction from a human being, it's all conveyors, turntables and robots-


This is the ink store -

-(yellow, red, cyan and black) and the ink pipes to get it up to the massive drum printers -

-this is the paper store (there is enough paper here to last only -ONE WEEK-) a robotic lifting device shuttles the delivered paper into empty slots on the enormous shelves-

-  (this store also goes up several more stories - it is a *lot* of paper)-

- robots cut the brown paper covering off when a reel is about to be used -

- and load them onto the (many) spools -


- and yes, even here there is the occasional paper jam, but sorting that out is automated too(!) as we discovered when one happened right in front of our eyes (complete with loud klaxon alarms) -


- then we went upstairs (finding practically the only humans in the place - they were checking the print quality of the output)-

- Here are some of the plates used to do the printing (it's a four phase print run, one for each of the differently coloured inks involved - in sequence)-

- and here is one of the (house-sized) printers in full production (the paper is just a blur) -


- from there it was on to the cutting and folding -


- stacking -

- packing -


- and then down a little spiral slide, back (eventually) to ground level-


- (where they get popped into delivery trucks by fork lift truck drivers)...this plant puts out 1.5 billion newspapers a year (26 million newspapers a week)...and it's all controlled by (well, when we were there anyway) one woman in the high-tech control centre... ;)

So there you go, that's how you get your copy of The Sun, The Times, Metro, Telegraph, FT (etc. etc.) plus associated glossy magazines every day...!  More pictures over here (if you like this sort of thing)... ;)