WORCESTER Yacht Chandlers is closing after more than 38 years of trading.

Owner Jacqui Morris has helped run the family business since she was eight years old, seven days a week, including Sunday mornings.

She even kept the Waterworks Road shop open during the "great floods" of autumn 2000, going to work from her flooded river-side home in a boat!

Now Miss Morris, aged 46, whose grandfather Sidney Arthur started the family boating business running passenger boats off Worcester Bridge, plans to take it easy.

"I'm going to sit in the garden with a glass of dry white wine and a chunk of cheese," said Miss Morris.

"And I can't wait to have a nice Sunday lunch, with stuffing and no skin on my gravy!"

The family is closing the business because they have sold the building it operates from.

"We're not getting rid of it because we're not making any money - we have had a very good standard of living out of the chandlers over the years - but we have sold the whole group of buildings, comprising about six units in all."

Miss Morris's father, John Morris, now 76, took over the business from his father and set up Pitchcroft Boating Station, a boat hire business he still runs with his wife Jean from their home, in Waterworks Road.

In 1965, Mr Morris and a group of friends, who all owned boat companies, opened Worcester Yacht Chandlers, in the Diglis Yacht Basin.

"They needed a warehouse to store their boats," said Miss Morris, who immediately started working in the chandlers with her sister Jill.

The family ran the business in Diglis Basin for 30-years, before deciding to move it to Waterworks Road, where they already owned some buildings.

"The building we're in now was originally my grandfather's sail loft where he kept the equipment for the hire boats and repaired the boats," said Miss Morris.

During the flooding at the end of 2000, Miss Morris and her parents were the only residents to remain in their homes in Waterworks Road, which was completely flooded.

"We had a foot and five inches through the house but we just moved upstairs," said Miss Morris.

"Everybody else went to hotels but we wanted to stay by the river. We lived on takeaway sandwiches and had some great parties."

Miss Morris said she was not sure what she was going to do now.

"I'm going to take a month off and chill out and think about it."

The chandler's last day of trading will be Sunday, July 27, from 10.30am. The doors will close for the last time at 1pm.