It was
super-interesting to visit Bedfordshire the other week to see “Westferry
Luton”, Richard Desmond’s new newspaper printing plant. One of the interesting
things being the name, of course.

I hadn’t realised
the Westferry name would live on beyond the docklands location era. That’s
quite a nice touch, I think. There’s something rather marvellous about a brand
new print site where everything has been set up just so from a blank sheet of
paper and all the kit is shiny and new. Westferry Luton is looking like a very
slick setup. And as chief executive David Broadhurst points out, once the new KBA
Commanders are fully on-stream with full-colour output, they’re bound to want
the same colour facilities at the group’s northern newspaper print hub in
Preston too, so it’s easy to envisage phase two going ahead as planned. And plans to add driers to the Luton presses to produce magazine-quality colour are super-intriguing too.

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