Projected on to a gauze screen in the middle of a vaulted gallery, Mat Collishaw’s “Eidolon” depicts a vast blue iris surrounded by flames that is — rather than being engulfed — enhanced by them. Accompanied by a recording of a choir singing from the Old Testament Book of Daniel, this work at the new Faith Museum in the town of Bishop Auckland feels like an appropriate metaphor for the regeneration taking place in this small northern community.
“Eidolon”, which lasts seven minutes and absorbs me so much that I watch it twice, is just one flickering, teasing sign of the £200mn that financier and philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer has invested in the town, a spending spree whose other manifestations include Spanish Old Masters, hotels, holiday cottages, formal gardens, pyrotechnics, a tapas bar and a troop of choreographed geese.
Born in 1951, Ruffer grew up 30 miles away in Stokesley, North Yorkshire, and trained as a barrister and stockbroker before moving into investment management in London in the 1970s. He set up Ruffer Investment Management in 1994 and by 2014 had an estimated wealth of £380mn.
His return to the northeast was sparked by news in 2010 that the Church of England was planning to sell a collection of paintings by the 17th-century painter Francisco de Zurbarán that had hung in Bishop Auckland’s castle for more than 250 years. Ruffer and his wife Jane stepped in to buy them — and the castle — forming a trust, now called the Auckland Project, that would open the building up to the public for the first time. Keen to spend a significant amount of time in the town, the Ruffers moved into a house close to the castle.
“I said to Jonathan when we first came up here to stay that I was thinking of getting some new curtains,” says Jane Ruffer, who still has the calm, pragmatic air of the NHS palliative care doctor she once was. “He said, ‘I’m thinking a bit bigger than that.’”
A dozen years later, my Auckland Project pass gives access to the castle, the Faith Museum, two galleries and much besides. I start in the castle, former home to Durham’s Prince Bishops, who once raised armies, printed money, levied taxes and generally behaved as near monarchs. Upstairs, the dozen Zurbaráns — depicting Jacob and his sons — are still in the dining room where Bishop Trevor chose to display them after buying them in 1756. Alongside an interactive display that gives context to the paintings, there’s a dining table, laid as if a party has just been abandoned, a reminder that these paintings were once only seen by a very privileged few.
Next door is the Faith Museum, which opened late last year, housed in a gloriously spare building made from local Cop Crag sandstone. Designed by the Stirling Prize-winning architect Níall McLaughlin, it draws inspiration from a tithe barn. Inside, works from Khadija Saye, who was killed in the Grenfell fire, are on show alongside the Bodleian bowl, on loan from Oxford university, which was used in the 12th century by Jewish people worshipping in secret in Britain. The next plan is to acquire a tapestry of St Paul by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, commissioned by Henry VIII but currently held in a collection in Spain.
So far, so museum-based, but gaze down from the walls at Auckland Castle and you’ll see what looks like an encampment. Look more closely and there are banks of tiered seating, a vast stage with a lake, a full lighting rig and, beyond it, a series of buildings housing restaurants, stables and a small farm.
Kynren is a spectacular live event performed in front of about 8,000 people on Saturday nights between July and September — this year’s run begins next weekend. The show, which is now in its eighth year, is choreographed by the team behind the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and uses 1,000 local volunteers, both performing and backstage. There is patriotism and local history, including the founding of the Bishop Auckland football team (which in happier days won the FA Amateur Cup 10 times). The cast includes 37 horses (white, so they can be seen better in the dark) and flocks of geese that bring the house down as they march across the stage, during a 90-minute show that’s rounded off with fireworks for extra drama. Seventy per cent of the volunteer cast and crew — who make all the costumes and build the sets — return each year. “It’s the first fruit of what we want to happen in the greater scheme of things,” Jane Ruffer says.
“There have been Kynren relationships and Kynren babies,” says Andy Nesbitt, who heads up the Auckland Project gardens team. In May this year, the castle’s upper walled gardens, where 17th-century bishops grew pineapples to impress their guests, opened to the public for the first time after an extensive renovation and redesign by Pip Morrison (who also reimagined the sunken garden at Kensington Palace in 2021). Beyond the castle walls, the deer park has also been restored and is free to enter.
After a stroll in the walled gardens, admiring the citrus fruits in the slightly steampunk greenhouse, the vegetables and the orchard, I head to the Spanish Gallery, a short walk away in the town’s cobbled market place. Opened in April 2022 by Prince Charles and Queen Letizia of Spain, here El Grecos and Velázquezes hang in gilt frames alongside a regular roster of loaned works. The Spanish theme is designed to complement the Zurbaráns and a nod to Jane Ruffer’s Spanish heritage; Jonathan Ruffer bought many of the pieces specifically for the gallery and wrote the notes displayed beside the paintings.
Next door the theme continues in a tapas bar, El Castillo (another Auckland Project outpost), where I have a rioja and chorizo lunch surrounded by both locals and — from overhearing the intensity of their discussion — visiting art lovers. Many of the ingredients come from the walled garden.
But despite the tapas and art, Bishop Auckland isn’t a twee tourist bubble: the gallery is flanked in the market place by a branch of the pub chain Wetherspoons and the brash signage of a Sports Direct store. And away from the area around the castle, with its attractive melange of Georgian, Victorian and earlier buildings, plus — incongruously — a town hall built in 1862 to look like a French château, the high street, Newgate, is a depressing strip dotted with shuttered stores and betting shops.
After lunch, I head across the square to another Auckland Project attraction, the Mining Art Gallery, which sheds light on the town’s recent struggles. Bishop Auckland’s economy was once driven by coal mining, but after a slow decline from the 1950s onwards, the last mine closed in 1987. Until October 6, the gallery’s Last Cage Down exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of the 1984 miners strike, with paintings including Robert Olley’s moving 2018 “Orgreave after Guernica” and Marjorie Arnfield’s “Women Protesting”. But the permanent collection is just as powerful, from Norman Cornish’s chiaroscuro “Chip Van” showing families above ground gathering for a meal, to Ted Holloway’s “Testing for Gas”, showing a single miner alone in a shaft.
Bringing visitors to the town, and getting them to stay, is key to the project, and its first hotel, Park Head, opened in February last year. The 38 bedrooms start at just £81 per night but there’s cheery Quentin Blake wallpaper in the bathrooms, a nice collection of Spanish beer in the bar to partner with proper British pub food, and banks of lavender and magnolia trees outside.
A step up in smartness, with Le Creuset casserole pots and antique furniture, are four new holiday cottages which opened this spring. I stayed at Lightfoot Cottage, where the front door opens onto the cobbles of the market place and the castle’s Grade I listed gatehouse. Also in the pipeline is a 70-room hotel in a 1970s office block close by, intended to be more upmarket and aimed at couples.
A committed — if maverick — Christian, Jonathan Ruffer believes that nobody should die with more than £20mn to their name, and he has no intention of stopping. “The birth pangs of all these different projects lead one to think either it won’t happen at all or it’ll all be a bit ordinary,” he says. “But every time the baby is born, it turns out to be remarkable. I mean Kynren is a truly special thing, the Faith Museum is a remarkable thing, the Spanish Gallery is an amazing thing.
“I hate the word philanthropist,” he insists. “I find it such a weasel word. I prefer ‘do-goodery’. It’s got an ambivalence about it. On the one hand, it is what it says on the tin. It is about doing good, but there’s nothing complimentary about calling someone a do-gooder.”
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