IN a terrible coincidence, it is almost 40 years to the day since 19 people died as a furnace-like blaze swept the Top Storey Club on Bolton's Crown Street.

This is just a couple of hundreds yards from where the ravaged Bolton Moat house Hotel stands today.

At the popular dance club, flames raced up the narrow staircase and straight on to the dance floor. Within minutes, 15 people, who had simply been enjoying an evening out, were dead.

Most were swiftly overcome by smoke as the room became choked. And four more perished in a desperate attempt to save their lives by jumping 80 feet from a window into the River Croal.

A dramatic leap by four others, however, saved their lives.

It was almost 2 hours before firemen from Horwich, Leigh and Radcliffe could recover the bodies as they battled to contain the fierce flames behind a wall of water.

Bolton was left numbed by the carnage, and equally by the cause of the blaze. While all the evidence pointed to it being started deliberately, the inquest jury failed to reach a firm decision on its cause, and returned an open verdict on all 19 victims.

The fire was one terrible chapter in the blazing history of Bolton town centre.

Bolton Town Hall was the scene of a massive fire drama in November, 1981 when the historic Albert Halls were almost destroyed by fire.

It was a Saturday teatime as flames engulfed part of the famous Victoria Square building, threatening the entire Town Hall building and lighting up the early evening sky.

A desperate battle by 130 firemen followed, using 30 pumps and 14 other appliances. They managed to contain the damage to the centrepiece of the Victorian building but it was reduced to a charred shell with gaping holes in the roof.

A £3.4 million rebuild took 3 years, resulting in the Town Hall as it stands today.

In 1985, a mystery blaze razed Bolton's famous roller skating rink, the Navada, to the ground. Flames and a pall of smoke hundreds of feet high left the two-storey building a smouldering ruin.

At the height of the fire, 70 firemen from all over Greater Manchester were at the scene, trying to stop the blaze spreading to an adjoining warehouse containing oil storage tanks and paint.

On one night in Bolton in January, 1997, firemen were called to two blocks of buildings in the town centre.

When they arrived at the offices of Farnworth Thomasson and Group off Victoria Square the second floor was well alight and a man was hanging out of a window shouting for help.

In the second blaze, in the conservation area of Wood Street, off Bradshawgate, a Georgian building at the heart of the town's legal and financial sector was ablaze.

The flames spread quickly through the 200-year-old three-storey premises, hitting adjoining buildings.

The final bill for this night of fire in Bolton town centre was more than £1 million.