A bus carrying pensioners was left stranded and full of smoke after a camper van in Kentish Town caught fire.

Firefighters were called to tackle a fierce blaze that had engulfed the parked van, which was empty at the time, in Prince of Wales Road around 3.30pm yesterday.

The fire was extinguished within minutes by firefighters from Kentish Town station who arrived on the scene in one engine.

Kentish Town resident Dean Williams, 25, a retail worker, was travelling to the Royal Free Hospital on the number 46 bus with his grandmother and sister to visit his grandfather when the bus was forced to stop because of the fire.

He had to wait on the bus with his 73-year-old grandmother and other pensioners for around 30 minutes before the bus could proceed.

“I don’t know how it started,” he said. “It could have been because of the heat because it was a hot day.

“All the smoke started coming into the bus and my nan suffers from asthma but we couldn’t get out the bus for safety reasons. The bus was engulfed in smoke, it was really stifling hot. It was like a furnace.

“My nan didn’t want to get out the bus because of the flames and the smoke. And she didn’t want to get out of the bus because we didn’t know if the car was going to blow up. We didn’t know what to do.”

Mr Williams, who also works for Spectrum Paranormal Investigations, added: “When the car was on fire, before the fire engine got there, there was a lady who tried to park right behind the car. My nan said, ‘I know parking spaces in Camden are hard to find but that’s taking the mick!’”

The fire is not being treated as suspicious.