FORTY years ago, fire tore through a Bournemouth landmark and changed the town permanently.

The photos on this page – some of them never before published – show the aftermath of the blaze that engulfed Bournemouth Bus and Coach Station in the early hours of July 25, 1976.

The station, off the Square at Exeter Road, was one of the town’s focal points. It consisted of an Art Deco, Portland stone building from 1929-31 which had been enlarged and rebuilt in 1959. It housed an underground coach station and ground-level bus station, with shops, restaurants and offices.

The blaze started in a coach, possibly from a discarded cigarette or an electrical fault, and by the early hours of that Sunday morning, the coach station was thick with smoke.

Peter Owen, then a 32-year-old police constable, was on the scene early and would receive a commendation for leading a young couple to safety through the smoke-logged coach station.

In 2013, he told the Daily Echo: “I saw from the entrance all the smoke coming out from underneath.

“Another policeman was there already and I suggested he went inside with me. He declined the offer. I don’t blame him for that.”

Mr Owen knew there was a handrail running around the edge of the darkened coach station.

“I got about 25-30 yards and shouted and somebody shouted back. I made my way to where they were shouting from,” he said.

The London couple had been sleeping in a coach and had been unable to reach safety. Mr Owen remembered glass exploding in the coaches around them as he kept his hand on the handrail and took them to safety.

“I don’t remember seeing the fire brigade. We were in and out before they arrived,” he said.

By 2.45am, fire crews were fighting their way into the station through thick clouds of smoke coming from a burning tyre store.

Meanwhile, police and members of the public helped drive buses out of the station.

Chris Harris, then a bus conductor, now author of the new book Hants & Dorset Recollections, says: “The top deck of the bus station, level with Exeter Road, was where all the Hants and Dorset buses were parked up for the night. The fire was in the coach station below, so there was considerable danger that the top section, complete with all the buses, might crash through to the coach station.

“People coming home from a Saturday night jumped into buses, drove them away and parked them in various places around town.

“The next day, several members of staff went around town trying to round up all the buses.”

At the time, a Bournemouth Corporation driver, Barry Siviers of Winton, said: “Explosions were going on in the coach station below as I drove buses out.

“There was an awful moment when we thought the ground was going to give way – I got out fast.

“I must have fallen unconscious afterwards after being overcome by smoke.”

As fire crews hosed the seat of the fire in the coach station, cracks started appearing in the walls.

The blaze was under control shortly after 6am, but the heat was still unbearable.

Sixteen coaches, two cars and a minibus were destroyed.

Chris Harris says: “The main thing is nobody was hurt, which was amazing, because the blaze was so fierce that a ship out at sea radioed in to say they had seen a strange light over Bournemouth.”

Hants & Dorset’s general manager, Peter Hunt, was at the scene at 4am. His Austin Princess was one of the cars destroyed in the fire, but he set to work organising the next day’s services.

Bus routes terminated at the Town Hall forecourt that day but were soon moved to the Triangle, while National Coaches were to go to the Shamrock and Rambler site in Holdenhurst Road.

Not a single Hants & Dorset bus had been destroyed and its services ran that day. “We didn’t lose a single bus journey,” says Mr Harris.

By the end of July, the Echo was reporting the bus station as a “write-off”. Buses could still be parked on the solid part of the top level and the bus company’s offices were still based there, but in 1979, the station was put up for sale.

The last buses left the site in 1980 and the following year, the office staff moved to Oxford Road, ready for the station to be demolished in 1982.

Today, the leisure complex BH2 – formerly known as West Central – is taking shape on the site. Around 50,000 tonnes of the bus station’s foundations were crushed and recycled for the project.

“It was a wonderful building in its day,” says Chris Harris.

“The sad thing is it was completely rebuilt between 1957-59 and in its rebuilt state it didn’t even have a 20-year life.”

* Chris Harris’s book Hants & Dorset Recollections costs £6 from Silver Link Publishing, nostalgiacollection.com