The newspapers’ proprietor, Hirst, Kidd and Rennie, has said that the press, whose decommissioning will lead to eight redundancies, would be too expensive to replace.

The move will mark the first time since the newspaper was founded in 1854 that the Chronicle, as well as the Chronicle Weekender, has not had its own press.

Since 1990, its print site has used a secondhand Crabtree Crusader, which was purchased from a Canadian publisher but was built in Leeds in 1969.

Managing director Philip Hirst said he would ideally like to sell the press. He said: “It is beautiful, but it is unlikely anyone will want it. I know when a similar press went in Oxford, a ship salvager broke it down for scrap. It’s a real shame.”

The Evening Chronicle has a run of 25,000, while the Weekender prints around 90,000 copies. The press also handles a few contract newspapers, which are likely to move to the recently revamped Trinity Mirror Oldham site.

Hirst said: “We needed to make improvements to the press, but the amount it would have cost didn’t seem worth it when the press was running for such a small amount of time.

“But the Trinity Mirror site is less than a mile down the road, and we will be able to run faster and have more colour. It was hard to resist.”