Stafford, with 70,000 people and a mainline railway station, did have a bus station of sorts at the railway station car park, this was removed in the early 70s, for extra parking, and replaced with a small bus stop across the road - and many other bus stops scattered around the town, where some services started or stopped, if you knew what went where, but there was no system and it changed all the time.
Around 2010, I was approached by two Arabic-looking lads, trying to find where to get a bus to the hospital, for interviews for jobs. I could see that they had already asked a few people and got no answer. They clearly suspected that people were being deliberately unhelpful, but I explained that there was no 'system', it was just up to you to know the current 'secret' about where any bus might go from. When I explained that Stafford really didn't have a bus station, one of them said to me "We're from Mosul. We've been bombed for twenty years and we still have a bus station!".
I took them a couple of hundred yards to a bus shelter and asked an old dear there where they should go - she told me and we set off another quarter of a mile to an obscure stop, which turned out to be right.
I hope they got the jobs.