There's a rather special birthday today as far as the T&A is concerned. Exactly 20 years ago the new £6 million Press Hall was officially opened alongside the Victorian premises in Hall Ings.

On July 21, 1981, the trusty but mature presses which had rumbled away faithfully for decades in the bowels of the old building were decommissioned and the Duchess of Gloucester pressed the button which started the afternoon run of the T&A on state-of-the-art presses in the new premises - conveniently, the 35,000th issue of this newspaper.

It was, the Duchess observed, an imaginative building. And surely there can't have been many people who have passed its glass frontage over the last couple of decades who would have disagreed with that.

By day, the Press Hall reflects the buildings around it. By night, the work being done inside is illuminated to the outside world. It's a major feature of the city centre. Yet for a time it seemed possible it might not be built there. In fact, only five years earlier there was a strong chance that the T&A's presence in the city centre could end.

At the start of the 1970s it became clear that Bradford & District Newspapers needed to expand. The equipment in the converted wool warehouse (which is what the premises between Hall Ings and Drake Street originally were) simply wasn't up to the job of producing the modern newspapers.

In a world of growing computerisation, the old "hot metal" methods of printing were beginning to seem anachronistic. The exciting world of new technology beckoned. But there was little point in re-equipping to produce newspapers by modern methods if they were to be then printed on outmoded presses.

At best, the three presses could produce a maximum of 32 pages. They were holding back progress. Readers, and commercial conditions, demanded larger newspapers.

They also demanded colour. People used to watching the news in colour on television were increasingly unhappy about seeing stories in their local newspaper illustrated only in black-and-white.

So a plan was discussed to abandon the city centre entirely and move the T&A and its sister titles to purpose-built premises on a site in Canal Road.

The recession of the mid-1970s put paid to that. So plan B was then brought into effect.

Alongside the T&A, in the crook of the elbow formed by Hall Ings and Drake Street, was a makeshift car park. On the site had stood the former Bradford Court House and prison, which had been demolished in 1958.

In 1976 the company entered into negotiations with Bradford Council, which owned the land, and the upshot was a 99-year lease on the area for a press hall.

But what style of a press hall? The existing building, the former Milligan & Forbes Wool Warehouse, was an ornate Victorian edifice designed in 1853 in the style of a Florentine palace of the 16th century. Follow that!

The late-1970s architects, along with the company, weighed up the cost of employing stone-masons to echo the hand-carved stonework, and then wondered whether a complete reproduction of the Victorian look was really what modern Bradford wanted.

Instead, it was decided a building fit for the closing decades of the 20th century should reflect the style of life, technology and advances in science of that period.

That decision taken, there was the small question of which material to use. The use of stone, brick or concrete, it was felt, would jar with the old building. The end result was that glass was chosen - and super-strength glass at that.

Excavation work began in August, 1979. The following June traffic along Hall Ings had to be halted for a day while the roof sections were hoisted into place by a giant crane.

But it was to be another year before the Press Hall, with its splendid new presses installed, was ready to turn out the bright, sharp, colourful, many-paged newspapers the readers of the T&A and its sister publications deserved with the new millennium lurking just around the corner.