The word ‘iconic’ is commonly misused to denote a landmark event, a famous person or a building. Fortunately, when the T&A’s glass press hall opened on June 7, 1980, that word still referred to the religious imagery of Russian or Greek Orthodoxy.

The building, most people agree, was a striking new piece of architecture. Not only did its dark glass reflect the buildings opposite on that part of Hall Ings, it allowed people passing by to look in at the inner workings of the newspaper’s production site.

Before then the newspaper’s presses had thundered away out of sight in the basement. To keep pace with printing innovations, the owners of Bradford & District Newspapers in those days, Westminster Press, decided to erect a new building on the site of the former County Courthouse between Bank Street and Hall Ings.

Excavation work started in 1979. Building started shorly after. The roof went on on June 7, 1980.

At the same time the newspaper’s presses were replaced with a £3 million super-press with greater capacity and much more colour. This development was in parallel with the change-over from hot metal type preparation to what was known as ‘cold type’ - computer-aided photo-typesetting.

In 1981 the T&A and its associated newspapers went from rotary press to web-offset lithography, a much cleaner production process.

In conjunction with these developments, typewriters were replaced with word processors. The old days of smoke-filled rooms loud with the clatter of mechanical keyboards and the burbling of black telephones was disappearing – along with trilby hats and macs with turned-up collars.

It was, indeed, the end of an era.