It’s been five years in the making and has been running at full capacity for almost a year, but still, Lenglet Imprimeurs’ £100m gravure supersite looks brand new. You probably wouldn’t eat your lunch off the factory’s concrete floor, but it’s clean. And it is, simply, vast. Knowing that its floorspace covers 50,000m2 still doesn’t quite prepare you for a building that seems to stretch, as the French would say, à perte de vue C as far as the eye can see.

　　The factory, in Cambrai, around an hour south of Lille in the north of France, is one of a number of state-of-the-art gravure plants on the rapidly changing long-run print scene. It now houses four 3.68m-wide KBA gravure presses, capable of producing up to 1,000 tonnes of print every day. But it is not alone. Investments by Polestar in Sheffield and Prinovis in Liverpool are the biggest UK-based competition. At closer quarters, Quebecor World, as part of the European ‘re-tooling’ programme that preceded its takeover by Roto Smeets last month, has recently spent £72m (