Rupert Murdoch's News International has opened the world's biggest printing plant in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, representing £650 million of investment by the company.

The new plant consists of 12 colour printing presses and covers an area equivalent to 24 football pitches. The new plant is able to print 70,000 papers every hour and means that News International's plant at Wapping will now be closed.

The Wapping plant is able to print 30,000 papers per hour and was considered to be at the forefront of printing technology when it was first opened in the 1980's, allowing newspapers to be mass produced, cheaply and with few workers.

According to the BBC's Torin Douglas, the new printing presses require fewer people to operate them than the Wapping plant, needing only 200 instead of 600 employees.

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