GAZETTE & HERALD: TRACEY Griffiths struck gold when she bought a sign that hung in the Chippenham nightclub where she met her husband 20 years ago.

The couple, now both 40, successfully bid for the metre long, pink neon Goldiggers sign on an Internet auction site.

Billed as the last surviving Goldiggers sign and a piece of musical history, the memento was rescued before the nightclub, on Timber Street was torn down earlier this year.

And now the sign has pride of place inside a disco built in the couple's back garden.

Mrs Griffiths, previously of Allington Way, Chippenham now lives in Croft Road, Swindon.

She said: "My husband Dave has just finished building a leisure room in our garden and this has already got a brick and a piece of rendering from Goldiggers set into the walls, which I took from the building's rubble back in March.

"If someone had said to me, when I was 18 that one day I would own the Goldiggers sign, I would have thought they were mad. But now I would love it if people who used to go came back to our place for a big disco."

The garden furniture designer heard the sign was for sale on eBay on a BBC Swindon radio breakfast show, just two days before the auction was due to finish.

Four hundred and thirty eight people clicked on the item in the nine days it was on the site, but the couple beat other bidders to take the prize.

There was a £500 reserve on the 25-year-old retro pink sign but the Griffiths' snapped it up for £350 when it was clear that amount wouldn't be met.

"It had been at £225 for a long time so the reserve was taken off," she said.

"My budget was £400 and I won the bid at £350, which was great."

During the 1980s Mrs Griffiths was a regular at the club and for six months she worked behind the bar.

In 1985, aged 20, she met her future husband while bopping on the dance floor and they were married four years later.

"Being a Chippenham girl, I did most of my growing up in Goldiggers," she said.

"In the early days I used to go to the old cinema and watch Saturday morning films. Then when Nigel Ross opened the club in the early eighties I used to go every Thursday with my friend, Tracey and we used to have a great night on two Cinzano and lemonades at 70p each.

"We used to dance around our white handbags."