Last day in Wapping...

...so it's goodbye Shuttle bus and thanks for all the lifts!  I've managed just over one year working in Wapping, some of my colleagues have been here almost 30 years(!), so while it's a bit odd (and exciting) for me, it's as nothing to the feeling of upheaval some others are going through!  Once we leave the building this afternoon (things are starting to shut down around 3pm) our door entry cards will stop working...next stop "The Place" (or "The News Building" as it will be known) on Monday morning (for a free breakfast, to find my locker, have a tour of the facilities - and then find somewhere to sit)!  Just got to pack the last few things into my crate, ready for my new (flexible) working life!

Fortress Wapping Demolition...

...quite a lot of it is already gone (as you can see), and the slow migration of staff from this office starts in a week and a half too, off to the Mini Shard in Southwark...a new era for Wapping...and a big bit of newspaper publishing history slowly crumbling into rubble...

...and another shot from lower down...bye bye News International...

Update - found some pictures on Flickr from someone that did a tour before the demolition started...

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)... ;)

The Sun and The Times covers today

Abandoned Metro Newspapers - DLR

Yep, believe it or not, this was the slightly ridiculous scene that greeted me as I got onto the DLR at Lewisham station this morning...No-one bothered to move them (obviously preferring to stand than tackle the task), even a member of staff who walked past them checking tickets turned a completely blind eye...incredible...

R.I.P. The London Paper

...so last week saw the last copy of "The London Paper" rolling off the presses, the last of the cheerful (or otherwise) migrant workers handing them out on the street corner and station concourse -

- and the end of any sort of free daily evening newspaper for those of us working at Canary Wharf...great...

For some reason (unlike the rest of London) we don't get heaps of London Lite deposited around the place at "going home time"...As a result, I have observed lots of commuters now voluntarily purchasing copies of the "Evening Standard" shocking the sales guys (who had a rather easy ride beforehand, frankly) or resorting to picking up copies of "The Wharf" to read (which is a weekly local paper focusing just on matters Dockland)...we need some sort of campaign to get the London Lite over here!

The other annoying thing is that in the morning I like to get my daily fix of Nemi, the evening was traditionally for me to chortle over Em...but all is not lost, there is a complete (free) archive of all Em cartoons over here...(if you haven't read them before, then please do so, it's an incredibly entertaining cartoon strip and was the highlight of my tube journey)!

Humph...

Times Archive Blog

This is quite nice, Rose Wild from the Times Archive is blogging interesting little tidbits from the last 200 years of published articles, like for example, their review of "Tess of the D'Urbavilles" from 1892...or the amusing tale of the Bishop and the Sea Monster...definitely one worth subscribing to I think... ;)

Metro front page today...

Story about THC in a certain preparation being useful for weakening cancer cells in preparation for chemotherapy - quote from chief researcher Dr Wai Man Liu "I'm in no way encouraging people to take up smoking the ganja"...

That's the technical term then is it Dr Liu? ;)

Environmental Issues - Canary Wharf

Every morning the Jubilee Line and the DLR chew up and then disgorge well in excess of 100,000 commuters (in the space of about an hour) onto the 14.1 million square feet of office that loom over the 97-odd acres of flood plain collectively known as "Canary Wharf"...(called this because historically this area was predominantly used as a dock for imports from the Canary Islands)...I could stop there, having already gifted you at least four interesting facts about this part of London with which to impress your friends and family, however, this statistical information has been presented to you to highlight a real potential logistical problem...and one that the London Underground addresses by name...

Each morning, an announcement is on loop at Canary Wharf station "Please do not discard your Metro Newspapers anywhere on the station or escalators, please carry them with you and use the bins provided", you don't get that at any other underground station I have visited (and it's worse if any freebies or leaflets are being given away, they especially are fair game for escalator dumping), but if you consider *most* commuters *will* pick up a Metro (or buy another morning paper), this is a colossal amount of paper waste ending up potentially dumped at the doorstep of Canary Wharf estate management -every day- and you know what? Apart from in the back of the dedicated (electrically powered) recycling carts -

- or the recycling bins -

- there isn't a stray copy of Metro anywhere in sight...so someone has actually got something rather perfectly right...It's easy to always complain about things that go wrong, but in this case some congratulations are in order, so jolly well done to Canary Wharf... ;)

The Sun Newspaper

...is obviously contempating a name change, following the extraordinary weather we have been enjoying just lately... ;)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Got it!

So it was waiting in the outside cupboard when we got back on Sunday (and had survived the storms intact, I am pleased to report)...I'm now on chapter seven (and enjoying every word)...Flyingpops is displaying an amazing amount of self control by waiting until I am finished before she makes a start (which is good, no fighting)... ;)

According to the Telegraph, it sold enough copies over the weekend to be the fastest selling book of all time (in the UK at least), putting it (amazingly) in roughly 1 household out of 10...it's also interesting to note that although it was only released in English, it sold a quarter of a million copies in Holland/Belgium (selling out completely), nearly 400,000 copies in Germany and 100,000 in India...!

I wonder what she is going to write next?

London Lite - Copy mistake - Play.com

(spotted at the foot of page 3 of the London Lite newspaper, Wednesday 13th of June, 2007)
Anything ring just slightly *wrong* about this ad to you?

I suspect someone may be in trouble... ;) If not, of course, I will welcome my £6.99 copy of Forza Motorsport 2 for the xbox 360...however, if you ask me to pay £40 for the Katie Price book, you can **** off... ;)