One small step for News Corp. One giant symbolic leap in press history

Many people will welcome the surrender of 'Fortress Wapping'

There are grey-haired former print workers in London's East End who still refuse to speak to each other because 25 years ago they were on opposite sides of the wall around Rupert Murdoch's Wapping compound. To union stalwarts, Fortress Wapping had a reputation as grim as the nearby Tower of London once had for those deemed to be traitors. The Wapping dispute, in 1986, was one the greatest defeats the British trade union movement ever suffered, comparable to the miners' strike that preceded it by a couple of years – but while the miners were fighting the Government, the print unions were fighting a private-sector firm. No employer has inflicted more damage on the unions than Rupert Murdoch.

Before Wapping, newspapers were put together by a cumbersome process by which metal characters were place on wooden racks to produce a mirror image of a page to be printed. Deadlines demanded that this be done quickly. This meant that the highly skilled men who put together the pages – and they were all men – had only to down tools for an hour or two for a day's edition to be lost, at vast cost to the proprietor.

They were also highly organised and operated a closed shop – now illegal under EU law – under which non-union members could not work as printers. But 30 years ago, the printers came under threat from new technology that made the technique of "metal on stone" redundant. When Lord Thomson, owner of The Times and Sunday Times, tried to introduce it in the late 1970s, the National Graphical Association (NGA) called a strike that took The Times out of circulation for more than a year.

NGA members returned to work, victorious, and Lord Thomson lost heart, selling his titles to Rupert Murdoch, who devised a plan to destroy the print unions' power. He bought a site in Wapping, had its fine Georgian buildings ripped down and replaced with an ugly compound-like structure that still stands on the site.

The print unions were told that he needed it for a new venture, an evening newspaper to rival the Evening Standard while, in great secrecy, IT experts were brought in from the US to install the latest computer equipment.

Murdoch also hired a private delivery firm, TNT, to distribute his newspapers by lorry to avoid the risk that the rail unions would refuse to handle them and struck a deal with Eric Hammond, the maverick leader of the electricians' union, who was prepared to break the tradition of TUC solidarity and help him recruit maintenance staff.

When all was ready, the print unions were presented with the news that all four of Murdoch's titles were moving to Wapping, where there would be direct inputting of copy by journalists, and a drastic reduction in the head count. The NGA and the other big print union, Sogat, which represented the less skilled and less well-paid staff, called their 5,000 members out on strike, unaware that this was exactly what Murdoch expected. He sacked them all.

For months, the new compound, surrounded by high walls topped with razor wire, was picketed day and night, sometimes by thousands of print workers and sympathisers. Some experienced journalists refused to work there, others left at the first opportunity, yet the TNT lorries emerged every day with their cargo of newspapers. The print unions made the painful discovery that, this time, they had been lured into a dispute that was costing them more than it was costing the firm. After more than a year, they gave in.

The power of the print unions was permanently broken, not just in Wapping but across the whole industry. The Independent, launched while the strike was still on, was a beneficiary. Not only that, but every other private-sector union took note of what could happen if they came up against a wealthy, determined proprietor backed by a sympathetic government. There have been no industrial disputes on the scale of Wapping since.