The building was designed to accommodate 40,000 passengers and 1,700 buses a day and included a complex brief of a bus station, with car park over, topped by a three-storey office block (Greyfriars House).

Whilst one of the conditions on the new tenants was that they would have to spend £1.5 million modernising the building, the Council granted a five-year rent-free period in exchange.

[5] The car park later reopened, although it closed for good a year later after the Council was unwilling to make the investment (reported at the time to be on the order of £250,000) to rectify the situation.

Buses ran from the bus station all around the town and went as far afield as Milton Keynes, Bedford, Peterborough, Leicester, Rugby and Bicester.

Services included a travel centre, operated by Stagecoach, as well as a newsagent, public toilets, optician, hairdressers, barber shop and a large cafe.

As the bus station was below both Greyfriars House and the car park, only a small amount of natural light reached the concourse, which did not help the building's reputation.

It was listed in a survey carried out by The Guardian, for Channel 4's Demolition series, as the third-most hated building in Britain[7] and dubbed "the mouth of Hell".

[12] 414 properties were evacuated, and the Grosvenor Centre was closed the night prior to the demolition –[1] which, scheduled to take place at an unannounced time between 8 am and 10 am, occurred at approximately 9.40 am.