Andy Love was washing his car when he first saw smoke pouring over his garden fence in Barnsley on Tuesday, where five houses have been completely destroyed by fire.

In the South Yorkshire market town, a blaze swept through the prefab homes in the small close of Woodland Drive. It took just minutes for entire houses to be reduced to rubble in the scorching heatwave, leaving nothing but their metal frames behind.

Thankfully, no one was injured, but neighbours battled flames with hosepipes all afternoon as temperatures rose to record highs across the UK.

Mr Love, 56, whose property backs onto the road where the five houses burned down, told i a group of shrubs lining his back garden saved his house.

“I was just washing my car when I saw the smoke coming over the fence, I thought ‘oh somebody’s having a barbecue’. Next thing I know I saw flames through the bush,” he said.

“I called the fire brigade. The station is only five minutes walk round the corner but they said they’d be 45 minutes – they’d been sent to Leeds or Wakefield I think.

“I said ‘look there’s a f*****g house burning down!’ Everybody was doing the same – making sure they got out.

“Nobody was hurt, the only casualty so far is a missing cat. But there were kids in the houses, I think the youngest was about six or seven-years-old.”

Luckily for Mr Love, the wind direction was fanning the flames away from his house, but the speed at which the fire was spreading was alarming.

“I was here with the hose pipe, lifting up fence panels, trying to stop it coming this way,” he explained. “It started on the roof [of one home] and within 10 minutes both houses had gone up.

“These houses were never designed to last this long. They’re prefabs from after the war.

“I’m absolutely stunned at how fast it went up. All of them from that one little bit of smoke. I saw the guttering melting and falling and I thought ‘that’s it’.

“It’s frightened seven bells out of me. I think they need to have a look at them. It’s supposed to be fire proof at the bottom but it’s the top, it’s all wood, that’s what happened, the wooden trusses went and then fell down into the middle and it was like a giant oven.

“It was just a case of ‘everybody out, everybody out’.”

Another resident, who declined to give his name, told i it took just two hours before the homes were “gone”.

“I was in the garden in my shed with the radio on listening about all these fires in London. The wife comes in and says ‘there’s three or four houses on fire’ I said ‘yeh in London’ and she said ‘no it’s here!’.

“I looked out the window and I could just see this dark cloud like it was going to rain. All the people in the houses came out onto the street.

“There’s a chap in his 70s or 80s lives in one who makes model windmills and sells them… it’s all gone.”

Six fire services declared major incidents as crews tackled blazes from the Scottish Borders to Cornwall and temperatures in some parts of the country exceeded 40°C, making it the UK’s hottest day on record.

At least 34 weather stations in England exceeded the previous UK temperature record, with Scotland also setting a new record high of 34.8°C.

Fire services in London, Yorkshire, Leicestershire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk declared major incidents with the London fire commissioner, Andy Roe, calling for a temporary ban on disposable barbecues in all public parks and open spaces.

Climate scientists have warned the public to expect frequent extreme weather because of climate change, saying that the heatwave must be “a wake up call to humanity”.

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