THE £50 million cinema and leisure scheme planned for Bournemouth’s former bus station site in Exeter Road is now half finished.

Bournemouth West MP Conor Burns toured the West Central site, where the first restaurants are due to open in October next year and the Odeon cinema in early 2017.

The arrival of the 10-screen Odeon will mean the closure of the town’s existing Odeon and ABC cinemas in Westover Road, which have recently been sold.

The leisure complex is being built for developer Licet and Legal & General, with tenants already lined up including Nandos, Handmade Burger, Coast to Coast, Prezzo, Ask Italian and TGI Fridays.

Andrew Ferguson, fund manager for Legal & General, said there was a lot of interest in the scheme.

“It’s probably the largest leisure development in the market for 10 years – certainly one of the most talked about,” he said.

The future of the Exeter Road site has been in the balance since fire wrecked the town’s bus station in 1976. The station was finally demolished in 1982 and the site was used as a car park for many years.

Conor Burns said: “It’s a great delight to finally see something happening here after a long transit.

“You can see in embryo what’s going to be here, with plenty of restaurants that are going to offer all sorts of dining styles and a large number of cinema screens in one place.”

He pointed out that the scheme was one of several high-profile town centre developments, including the Hilton Hotel due to open next month.

“If you judge a town’s vibrancy and confidence in its future by the number of cranes and the investment in new development, then you can clearly be reasonably confident in Bournemouth’s future,” he added.

Licet director Chris Dymond said: “It’s been a lot of effort by a lot of people to get here. We were always very keen that it was the right place for this project to happen.

“It had its trials and tribulations but it’s almost exactly at the half way stage.”

Rod Nutbourne, project manager for Vinci Construction, revealed that 50,000 tonnes of foundations from the bus station had been crushed and re-used on the project.