Last night at Wapping

This is the last weekend of newspaper production at Wapping.

For twenty two years, the first amid terrible scenes of violence, four great papers have been printed between The Thames and a nineteenth century rum store in the docklands of London.

The journalists were there too.

From next week the writers and the printing machinery will be several miles apart.

I haven't yet seen the new £650 million presses for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World.

Even from the TLS, particularly from the TLS you might say, I  have appreciated a powerful investment of confidence in the future of print.

A writer or editor need never do the visiting any more.

The presses have flown.

But the print remains.

Those that have visited the new sites report the same sense of amazement that I felt on first secretly visiting Wapping, a few weeks before our move there (I was then at The Times) from the Gray's Inn Road in 1986.

It is amazing to think now how that initial secrecy was so important. . . . .

. . .so important to defeat the power of the print unions. .

. . to win the simple right of writers to use computer technology that was old even then.

This blog could continue now in its staccato form, setting out the vital importance for the British print industry - and all British industry - of what happened in Wapping then.

But it won't.

It has all been said.

Except that I'm reminded of the very first leader I wrote for that first Wapping issue, dated January 27, 1986.

It looked just like this blog.

Not because we had suddenly changed our leader style along with our home.

Long paragraphs were still de rigeur for a Times leader on the then dramatic Westland Affair, the resignation of Michael Heseline (right) and for all other topics.

But because the writer, this writer, had not been concentrating during his computer tuition.

That night was the first on which Times journalists had input their copy without the intervention of printers.

And some of us were quicker to pick up the art than others.

When the first edition arrived from the great new blue presses, I was red-faced to see that every sentence, sometimes half-sentences, in my resonant, Times-leader-style prose had come out as a separate paragraph.

Only readers abroad or in the Scottish isles had the opportunity to see this horror.

A rapid 'replating' restored the virtues of paragraphing for the rest of the print-run.

Those same early copies, I remember, also had on the front page the news of a will, for some Pounds 300,000, left by a gentleman from Shoreham-by-Sea.

This too did not signal a new editorial policy - only an anxiety that in the search for perfection we did not miss the new delivery trucks.

No proof of these failures remain.

I tried to find a genuine first Wapping edition copy for the tenth anniversary in 1996 but to no avail.

I wondered today whether there was any new tribute to the place I could add amid the yarns of legend.

A few one-sentence pars - staccato, a little excessively so, in what is now a normal electronic style on this blog - seemed, for me, the most suitable thing.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

For years Fleet Street meant British newspapers and journalism. I have wondered if any still remain there.
I lived in England during the later 1980s, and remember the turbulence of the period: the ascent of Margaret Thatcher, the miners, Wapping.

[Dion Per Sona]

Reminiscences. I was at the time working at a large semiconductor manufacturer. The Chairman was proud of being hand in glove with intelligence outfits, who, in turn, did not want personal computers marketed. Privately executives had all the same been developping....a front-line personal computer.
They were fired, the project killed, and of course some other big software company was first to market.