A FLOWER shop proprietor who has traded in a Kent town for more than 60 years has seen her business days end with the bailiffs.

Fellow traders and customers were shocked and saddened to find the Dolly Knighton's shop at the top of the High Street in Margate closed after almost a record stint of near non-stop opening.

Miss Knighton is understood to be in her 90s and bent double with osteoperosis, but has been in business since the 1940s and was renowned for opening 365 days of the year, even on Christmas Day.

While ever present in her shop, she was widely and affectionately known as “whistling Dolly” for her adept and distinctive trilling.

The shop door was quickly plastered with tributes to Dolly, and angry laments about the shop’s closure. Other shopkeepers have blamed her business' demise on the blight affecting many small traders in Margate.

Pauline Dunill, of Pauline’s Café opposite the florists, said it was a constant struggle to stay open with the bailiffs being regular visitors to several town centre businesses.

Ms Dunill laid the blame upon the opening of Westwood Cross combined with the closure of Dreamland and inadequate regeneration efforts, failing to benefit many small traders.

She said: “We are all drowning here and feel we get a lot of empty promises about regeneration and the fantastic future but we can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. We feel decisions are taken that just benefit a few people but nothing is done to continue the community.

“It is tragic that Dolly has closed, everyone says they cannot remember a time when Dolly was not there. She is part of Margate and she lived for her business.”

Ms Dunill said she has had a constant flow of people in the café asking: “Where’s Dolly? What’s happened?”

She said the bailiffs arrived at 7.30am on Saturday, February 16. They had changed the locks and when Miss Knighton and her brother had arrived later they had simply left again.

A spokesman for the UK Bailiff Group said the shop had been closed under “the Law of Distress”.

This gave the landlord the right to forfeit the lease but he understood there had not been a lease in place at the time.

He said: “We worked within the law. This law is an ancient remedy for commercial land, it is completely different to residential law.”

The spokesman said the law could be applied if tenants used premises for something they were not permitted to do. Negotiations were still possible between tenant and landlord.