A 19th Century £5 note from the North-East was sold for more than £16,000 at auction yesterday.

A Newcastle branch of the Bank of England opened in April 1828 and notes were issued from there until the start of the Second World War.

A spokesman for auctioneers Bonhams said the note in yesterday's sale, from 1849, was clean and quite crisp. It fetched £16,450, well above the £8,000 to £10,000 expected.

Another bill, issued by the Bank of England's Portsmouth branch in 1849, was the most valuable of a set of "white fivers" made by regional banks that went under the hammer at the London sale, selling for £21,150.

The spokesman said: ''They are incredibly thin, almost like tissue paper. All they have is a picture in the top left of Britannia and in the bottom left the letters 'five' in a Gothic script."

Bonhams' banknote specialist Michael O'Grady said: ''No other group of early branch notes like this have ever been sold at auction before and this is the earliest Bank of England Newcastle note ever to have been offered."