A wealthy Christian spent £200m reviving this northern town – but not everyone is happy

Telegraph

12-04-2025

An African tawny eagle, nearly 3ft tall, recently enjoyed a taste of freedom in the skies above the small northeastern town of Bishop Auckland.
Finally, it was hungry enough – there not being any elephant carcasses in County Durham – to be tempted down from a tree with a dead rat. The eagle, known as Billy, is one of more than 200 species from around the world being reared for a conservation-focused bird show, due to commence performances in 2026.
Bishop Auckland, once the hunting retreat of the Prince Bishops of Durham, who had power to raise armies and mint coins, is now a small, run-down town where the once bustling market has dwindled to one man and a van. Many shops in the high street are boarded up. But things are changing.
Today, instead of clergy in their finery, there is a growing trickle of tourists from around the world. The town is home to an ambitious regeneration charity, The Auckland Project, centred around art, culture, history, and – soon – birds.
Since 2016, it has been staging Kynren, an annual pageant of English history with a cast of nearly 1,000. In one scene, a Viking ship rises from a lake, with men on deck, swords aloft. They breathe underwater with the assistance of scuba divers.
For a quieter experience, there's the Faith Museum, which opened in October 2023 in a sleek stone building beside the Bishop's Palace. Artefacts trace 6,000 years of British history through the lens of religion and philosophy.
The finance for much of this regeneration has mostly come from one man: City investor, art collector and committed Christian, Jonathan Ruffer, who has given at least £200 million of his own wealth to the project.
He bought the Bishop's Palace 13 years ago for £11 million, opening it to the public seven years later.
The hope is that tourism will also resurrect the mile-long high street, and the seeds of change are sprouting. Shops and cafes are opening in buildings that have been empty for years. Grade II-listed McIntyre is one. Once famed for bespoke leather goods, it reopened in December as a café and gift shop selling local arts and crafts.
Bars of £6 artisan chocolate 'are flying out the door', said Fiona MacAlpine, hospitality coordinator, who thinks the difference the Auckland Project has made is 'fab'. 'Bishop [Auckland] was dying,' she added. 'Things had to change.'
The café provides work experience for catering students from Bishop Auckland College, which, in partnership with The Auckland Project, is training up a workforce to cater for a planned one million visitors a year. Not bad for a former mining town of fewer than 20,000 residents.
A few doors down is Inspiral Cycles. 'We could have rented a unit at the out-of-town shopping centre, with more footfall and easy parking, but we chose to buy in the high street,' says co-owner Gary Ewing. 'My wife and I both volunteer in the Kynren show and she could see the improvements that all this regeneration would bring, so we opted to establish ourselves in the town centre. It's been tough, but we've no regrets.'
The wider area is a hotspot for cycling, with miles of car-free routes and quiet roads. I cycled to Durham, 12 miles away, on a former railway line through fields and moorland. This is the birthplace of commercial passenger trains. Two hundred years ago, in 1825, the steam locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, was the first to haul a passenger train on public railway lines.
It travelled 26 miles from a station three miles away, Shildon, now home to a small railway museum, to Stockton. On a restored 16-mile stretch of track between Bishop Auckland and Stanhope is the Weardale Railway, where diesel trains take day-trippers through spectacular dales landscapes.
There are plenty of walks too. I hiked part of the Auckland Way to the town of Spennymoor, diverting through bluebell woods and to Binchester Roman Fort.
Another day, I followed a muddy, arduous path beside the River Wear for four miles to Escomb, with its sweet little Saxon church, one of the most complete in England.
Back in Bishop, as the locals call it, I went to the palace's large private chapel, my first port of call on a self-guided tour. Fellow visitors Joe and Joanna Barclay were excited to find the crest of a bishop who was one of Joe's ancestors. They were on a short break from their home in Berkshire, they said. 'Yesterday we went to Raby Castle. That's worth a visit,' said Joe. 'But we've mainly come to County Durham because we've heard a lot about the Zurbarán paintings,' said Joanna.
Ruffer bought the palace to save this collection by the 17th-century artist, bought by Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham in 1756. Ruffer feared the works – 13 life-size portraits of Jacob and his 12 sons – would end up overseas, and had to buy the palace too if they were to remain in place.
Today, they still hang in Bishop Trevor's dining room. Each figure is a clothes horse for rich textiles. 'Zurbarán's father was a haberdasher,' explained a volunteer. The other rooms in the palace are furnished in the style of bishops through the centuries, including a bedroom in spartan 1980s decor as might have been enjoyed by then Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, complete with a television showing Spitting Image.
The palace looks out onto a walled garden where the Ruffers have spent nearly a third of a million on topsoil alone. The total spend on the gardens has reached £10 million. The Paradise Garden features an original heated wall where melons would have grown. The furnaces that once heated the brickwork have recently been excavated. A new water feature, designed by Pip Morrison, known for his work at Kensington Palace, is in the shape of a cross.
You can have a bird's eye view of all this from a 15m-high viewing platform, Auckland Tower, in the market square. The structure opened in 2018, but caused controversy – with critics describing it as a 'sore thumb'. It symbolises a division in town, with some residents opposing Ruffer's interventions.
As well as the tower, the market place is home to other ventures of The Auckland Project: two art galleries, one devoted to the Spanish golden age and one to local mining art, a new community centre, and some carefully restored holiday cottages by the palace gates, once the homes of palace chauffeurs, butlers and gardeners. By 2027, there will also be a 60-room hotel.
In the Spanish Gallery, occupying a former bank, there's one painting of which the staff are especially proud. It is of Spain's patron saint, Saint James of Compostela with Saint Teresa of Avila. For geo-political reasons, Philip IV was campaigning to have this Carmelite nun adopted as a co-patron saint. It was an audacious suggestion.
Finally, Pope Urban VIII decreed against and the Spanish Inquisition set about destroying any reference to the two saints together. This early 17th-century painting by Juan Bautista Maíno escaped. Ruffer snapped it up in 2018.
Across the road, in the gallery of mining art, there are paintings by miners, some of whom were able to turn their hobby into a profession, such as Norman Cornish. There are achingly nostalgic scenes and others of gritty determination.
I learnt about the Bevin Boys (conscripts for the mines) and ' marras ' (a Durham miners' term for a trusted friend or workmate who can be relied on in times of need), terms I had never come across before.
Men toiling deep below ground in hot coal mines seems a world away from the opulent art of Spain's golden age, but Bishop has always been a town of two halves, according to residents.
In splendid tapas restaurant, El Castillo, the man at the next table told of a huge Art Deco property, 'built like a Miami drug lord's mansion', on the market for £1.4 million, while in the neighbouring street, two-bedroom houses go for under £100,000.
Bishop Auckland really is that travel writing cliché: a place of contrasts. The grit and the pearl sit side by side. Faithful or not, it's well worth a pilgrimage.
The essentials
Paul Miles stayed as a guest of The Auckland Project. Holiday cottages sleeping four cost from £139 per night.
A pass to visit all attractions – Bishop's Palace and gardens, both art galleries and the Faith Museum – costs £30 per person, valid for one year. Cross Country Trains travel to Darlington from where there are connections to Bishop Auckland.