A tea caddy, designed by Manx artist Archibald Knox, has sold at auction after being bought on the BBC’s Antiques Road Trip.

The show sees two antiques experts given a £200 budget and five days to buy items from shops which they later sell at auction and use the profits to buy more objects. The person with the largest profit after the five auctions wins.

During the latest series, filming in Cornwall and Devon, antiques expert and daytime TV auctioneer, Christina Trevanion, found the tea caddy in a shop in Minehead, Somerset.

Ms Trevanion asked the shop owner, a man called David, to show her his ’favourite thing’ in the shop, to which he responded by revealing the tea caddy. It was designed by Knox when he was working for the world famous department store Liberty in London. While Liberty was one of the most influential retailers of fine designs, the company kept its artists anonymous, only marking their work with a code which revealed who had designed it.

The tea caddy, made of silver, is described by Ms Trevanion as ’being so typically Archibald Knox’.

She added: ’That great, great man, enamelling on there. There will be a record book somewhere, that would be able to track down this reference number. Because it wasn’t stamped Archibald Knox, because Liberty [founder Arthur Lasenby Liberty] was so protective of his brand, he never let anyone, with the possible one exception of Moorcroft, he never let anybody sign their work that was then retailed through Liberty.’

The Archibald Knox tea caddy was valued at about £400 and bought, alongside a moser jug for £480 for the pair. At auction, the caddy sold for £490, giving Ms Trevanion a £90 profit.