They say even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but that is more than can be said for a historic timepiece on one Kent high street.

The dual-faced timekeeper in Cheriton, Folkestone, is currently running more than an hour slow, making it useless for any passers-by hoping to tell the correct time.

To maintain an accurate reading, the ornate clock – which is more than a century old – requires regular adjustments to its mechanism, a task which in recent years has been undertaken by local man Frank Bond.

But the dismayed 82-year-old retired engineer, who lives in nearby St George's Road, says he is now unable to access the room in the A&M Removals and Storage building that houses the clock’s mechanism because the renter of the space will not allow it.

“It needs manual intervention from time to time on the basis that it sometimes goes fast or slow, and it’s running very slow at the moment,” Mr Bond said.

“It’s about an hour and a quarter slow, which is not really of any use to anybody.

“Adjustment is always needed; if I went in there today I would adjust the pendulum to make it go a bit faster, then adjust the hands, and that would be everything.

“It’d be working for the rest of the day and it’ll probably carry on for a week or two. It only takes a few minutes, it’s not a lot of time.”

The clock was made in 1915 and was originally installed outside the Davis & Davis building in Folkestone’s Sandgate Road, before being relocated to Cheriton Road when the furniture, removals and storage firm opened a new base there.

Mr Bond recalls using the timepiece to tell if he was late for class when he attended school in Cheriton as a boy in the 1950s.

By the 1970s the clock had fallen into disrepair and no longer ran, and it was not until Mr Bond launched a successful fundraising campaign to pay for restoration that the hands once again told passers-by the correct time.

In 2013 the then-Mayor of Folkestone, Rodica Wheeler, joined Mr Bond and other locals for a ceremony to celebrate the installation of an automatic winding mechanism to keep the clock turning.

But without regular intervention to adjust the pendulum – and twice-yearly turning of the hands when the clocks go backward and forward – it is simply not possible for the clock to maintain accurate time.

Does that matter in an age of smartphones, when the vast majority of us carry the time in our pockets?

Mr Bond said: “It’s a public thing, it’s a public amenity that should be working, if only to give people a guide as to what the time is so they know whether they are early or late.

“I frequently find I need to look up for a clock because I can’t see my watch, it’s all covered up.

“You could say this is all a storm in a teacup really, it’s a silly business all together, but I think it would be a benefit to the town to see it working again – it’s not just for our personal satisfaction.”

Unfortunately it appears the situation has reached an impasse, as a spokesman for A&M Removals and Storage said: “The unit which the clock is in is currently rented out to a client

“As you can appreciate, the client doesn’t want the public accessing his unit which he pays for.”