TV presenter Jonathan Dimbleby said he was saddened of hear of the planned closure of a bookshop founded by Winnie-the-Pooh's friend Christopher Robin.

And a heritage group has called for efforts to be made to keep the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth open.

Last week we revealed the shop will close in September, 60 years after it opened.

Owners Rowland and Caroline Abram, who have run the shop for the past 15 years, said high rent and rates plus increasing competition from online retailers and supermarkets had made it financially unviable.

The town's only bookshop was opened by Christopher Robin, son of Winnie-the-Pooh author AA Milne, in 1951.

Mr Dimbleby, who remembers Christopher Robin running the shop, said he had visited it on many occasions over the past 45 years and expressed his sadness over its imminent closure.

He added that he wondered how much freeholders extracted in rents from small businesses in market towns, which had resulted in so many of them closing.

Mr Dimbleby, who lives at Moreleigh, said: 'You can milk a cow for so long but eventually it dries out and if you treat small businesses like that they go under and in the process the community is ill-served and the character of the place perishes also',

He added that the availability and choice of books online, particularly paperbacks, may have drawn customers away but he said he still felt people would continue to use bookshops.

'The great challenge was to make them so attractive that people felt they couldn't pass by,' he said.

Dr John Baldock, chairman of heritage group Dartmouth and Kingswear Society, said: 'There is a strong case to be made for the retention of this very special shop in Dartmouth, for it is not just any bookshop.

'The connections to Christopher Robin, commemorated in the blue plaque on the wall, are well known and the bookshop is a source of pilgrimage for the many fans of the AA Milne stories from all over the world.

'Those visitors spend time and money in Dartmouth. It helps put the town on the map and contributes to its economy.

'So how to keep it open? There may be scope for it to be run as a community bookshop, on non-commercial lines, perhaps as a trust. Is there sufficient interest locally in looking at ways of taking on and running a new Harbour Bookshop on the ground floor of the refurbished building?'

Dartmouth resident Anthony Fyson echoed Dr Baldock's call. In a letter to this newspaper, he said: 'That a town with the literary and historical associations of Dartmouth might be left without a proper bookshop is unthinkable, not least for younger residents and visitors for whom Pooh bear is a perennial star attraction.

'The connection with author AA Milne's son, the immortal Christopher Robin, is part of the town's national and international tourist "offer" and should not be cast aside casually in favour of another coffee shop or modish clothes emporium.

'If no existing business feels it can take on the bookshop role, there must be a case for some kind of trust-run community enterprise being established to take its place, retaining existing expert and helpful staff, but innovatively run on a not-for-profit basis.

'I would ask that the owners of the present bookshop business and the company that has made a planning application to alter the building should put their plans temporarily on hold, to allow time for interested people to explore the possibilities.

'This is not just an issue of commercial considerations forcing another shop use to change, but impinges on Dartmouth's self-image and public standing as a liveable, literate and ambitious community.'

Emilie Clarke and Alan Heard, of Newport Street, Dartmouth, have taken their five-year-old daughter Francesca, a fan of Winnie-the-Pooh, to the shop many times.

Ms Clarke said the imminent closure of the bookshop was incredibly sad and an unimaginable loss.

'Francesca was taken there to buy books and for her not to be able to do that anymore is devastating', said Ms Clarke, who added the book industry was under threat from several fronts and supermarkets selling best sellers was one of the biggest problems.

She said she would continue to support the bookshop, while it remained open, as it was 'a real luxury to go in, browse and choose books'.

She added: 'You can't get that from the internet.'

Holidaymaker Andrea O'Sullivan, a Midlander visiting the town with her husband David, said the planned closure of the bookshop was a terrible shame.

She said her children were huge fans of Winnie-the-Pooh while growing up and part of the town's character would be lost with the shop's closure.

But, she added, it was not an entirely surprising, considering the competition from online retailers such as Amazon. With regard to e-books, which can be read on iPads, Mrs O'Sullivan said reading a book gave a special pleasure you couldn't get from an electronic book.