MEMBERS arrived at an exclusive Hale fitness club to discover it had closed and the locks had been changed.

The owners of the £450 a year Nautilus Fitness Centre broke the news to its hundreds of members the day before the closure.

Employees say Barry and Chris Mitchell phoned them the night before the closure to be told they had no jobs and they would not be paid.

They say they were told last Tuesday night that they would be "paid by the government."

But Barry told SAM he only discovered that the 20 year-old club had to go into liquidation two days before the closure.

He said they had been forced to close because membership levels had fallen since a fire at the club last February.

He said they had subsidised the club for some time, but the falling membership and plans for a new fitness club less than half a mile away had made the closure inevitable.

He said: "After the fire, the number of members went down dramatically, even though we didn't close for one day during the rebuilding. We used to have 750 to 800 members, but this fell to 420."

He said: "Staff and members are upset, but we're also upset. I started the business when I was 24 and I'm now 44. It's the only business I owned and I've lost it."

But the longest serving employee at the club, receptionist Kath Power, said: "I think we've been treated extremely shabbily. No one deserves to be treated like this. Some of us have worked here for a long time, but we've been given no notice."

Some members had only recently joined the club and are now trying to recover the money owed to them.

Former members of the club are holding a meeting at the Cheshire Midland Hotel on Ashley Road, Hale at 8pm tonight (Thursday), to discuss their plan of action.