A YOUNG Kent couple have gone from redundancy to riches after scooping an £8.5 million Lottery win.

Neil Chester said he went shaky and his vision blurred as he realised he had won the Wednesday’s Lotto rollover prize of £8,531,595 after buying five lucky dip tickets from the Tesco Extra in Westwood Cross in Thanet.

Only days before the 31-year-old, from Margate, had accepted voluntary redundancy from a small firm in Guernsey where he worked as an IT engineer.

Money was so tight that his wife Kate, 30, and their four children had been forced to move out of the four bedroom Edwardian town house they were renovating in Guernsey to live with her dad in Margate.

Neil said: "It’s been horrible the past couple of months. Up until I’d been made redundant I’d only been seeing the kids every other weekend.

"We were saying that 2007 has been a terrible year and that next year we could start afresh".

Neil was on his way back from a job interview in London on Friday when he popped into his local newsagent’s in Margate to check his numbers.

He said: "I gave the ticket to the guy to scan and expected him to screw it up and say bad luck, you didn’t win. Instead a form printed out telling me to contact Camelot.

"When I first read it I thought it said £800, 500 because I couldn’t focus, my vision had gone blurry. When I realised how much I’d won I went a bit dizzy and then I sprinted home and gave Kate a big kiss."

Neil, who says he is still waiting for Ant and Dec to spring out and say it is all a joke, said it was a strange twist of luck that led to his Lottery win.

He said: "You can’t play the Lottery in Guernsey so if I hadn’t been made redundant I wouldn’t have bought the ticket; that’s fate for you."

The lucky couple plan to stay in east Kent and are looking for a "really nice home with a big garden". They also want to buy a Chrysler Voyager and Kate hopes to take horse riding lessons.

Despite the huge lump sum the couple say they hope to stay grounded.

Neil said: "It’s obviously going to change out circumstances and our way of life. We have lots of good friends around us.

"We tried to explain to the children that this is not something that we have achieved or that we are better than other people, it’s just that we are extremely fortunate. "

Neil isn’t going to return to work and instead wants to spend time with the couple’s three sons aged five, eight and 10 and their 18 month old daughter.

He is going to treat himself and his three sons to season tickets for Manchester United, where he once tried out when he was 16.

They also plan to treat their eight-year-old son to an Eiffel Tower lego set.

He had wanted it on the family’s last trip to Bluewater. Kate said: "I told him we couldn’t afford it, but that if we won the lottery I’d buy it for him. When we told him we’d won the first thing he asked was if we could go back to Bluewater to get the lego set."

The couple, who met at football club in Guernsey, also plan to take the honeymoon they couldn’t afford when they were first married in 1998 and also a family holiday to Disneyland Paris.