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As part of a series of features to mark the 125th anniversary of the Bath Chronicle, Emily Williamson looked at the changes in newspaper production over the years.

Crashing computers may be the bane to today’s newsroom, but over the years even the weather has scuppered the Chronicle’s production.

From hot metal to the latest Tera technology the working newsroom has changed beyond recognition.

And whilst everything is done on screen today, it was only a few years ago that pages were literally stuck together.

Martyn Sell, who has worked at the Chronicle for 14 years, remembers the days when the pictures and the words were waxed on the page and then photographed before the negative went to print.

But he said: “We used to get the pages pasted up in Wells and then they would come to Westgate Street for us to photograph.

“But on one hot day the wax melted and when the pages came up, all the photographs and headlines had fallen off.”

On that occasion staff worked through the night re-pasting the pages to ensure the paper came out on time.

But even on a good day Martyn said: “Sometimes we would never get the pages until 1am to shoot the pages for the plate maker, and we still had to be in work the next morning.”

Traditionally journalists spent their days bent over a typewriter, two fingers tapping away at the keys.

The typewritten copy went to printers who used linecaster machines to batter out type in hot metal.

As ex-Chronicle columnist and women’s editor Tina Currie recalled: “Westgate Street was noisy, dirty and smelt of printers’ ink and hot metal. But there was such a sense of everything going on.”

It was in September 1984 that the 107-year-old tradition of using metal type to produce the paper changed to photo-composition.

Printers punched the stories into a computer to set “cold type” – produced by exposing light sensitive paper to a laser.

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