BBC Antiques Road Trip smashes record as £60 household item sells for £20,000
A household item costing just £60 has smashed BBC Antiques Road Trip records - by fetching £20k. In a repeat broadcast from 2021, viewers were left open-mouthed when a rare antique camera, bought for just £60 by Antique Road Trip’s Paul Laidlaw, sold for an extraordinary £20,000.
Paul made the incredible find while shopping for curios and collectables in Margate, Kent. He inspected a boxed optical instrument closely, which led him to believe it was a primitive sub-miniature camera, viewers watching at home saw.
Photographic experts confirmed Paul’s 19th century find was one of Auguste Bertsch’s extremely rare Chambre Automatique cameras — essentially a camera combined with microscope. Speaking of the store where he found the item, Paul said: "Three floors, the upstairs is mainly furniture but there's stuff everywhere.
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"And on this floor, there are four rooms through and in the middle, there's a staircase which goes down to a room full of chairs and another room full below." He said: "Don't send the cavalry, okay?" The shopkeeper told him: "Give me £60, and I'll shake your hand, but I'm not doing any better than that, I'm afraid."
"I think this is a very early camera. If I'm right, that could be quite exciting. The photographic market is very much in the ascent, it's a hot market, I think that's a good thing," Paul said. Later, Paul met with auctioneer Edward Crichton.
Edward told him: "The sub-miniature camera - I have never seen one, in fact, we have carried out some research and cannot find any other example which has sold at auction, we were very excited to see this and it has certain potential to make a significant profit."
Paul’s record profit smashed the previous best: a Tibetan bronze deity bought for £50 by Anita Manning, selling for £3,800 in 2016.