Saturday night's the knight for Kynren

“MY hope is that in ten years’ time people will say that Bishop Auckland is fantastic – it has Kynren, it has Binchester, it has Auckland Castle, it has the Spanish gallery of paintings, it has the Stockton and Darlington Railway going nearby,” says Jonathan Ruffer on the eve of Kynren’s first public show. “They will say it is amazing how good a place it is.”

Mr Ruffer, a city hedge fund manager with a personal fortune of about £380m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, came in 2013 to Bishop Auckland, a town which had even been forsaken by McDonalds. He grew up about 30 miles south in Stokesley, and had been alerted by The Northern Echo’s campaign to the secret sale by the Church Commissioners of the 17th Century Zurbaran paintings in Auckland Castle.

BRAINCHILD: Jonathan Ruffer

A man of deep Christian faith who for many years had been using his City fortune to combat inner city deprivation, he bought the paintings and the castle for £15m, and donated them back to the town.

“I came up to the region because I wanted to see a spring in everybody’s step, and we started off by acquiring the Zurbarans – that was the flag up the flagpole, that was the mouth and Kynren is the trousers,” he says, with a typically colourful, Rufferian turn of phrase.

Later that year, the former Eleven Arches golf course, on the opposite bank of the River Wear to Auckland Castle, came up for sale. In the early 19th Century, a Bishop of Durham had bought the land so he could demolish the unsightly coalmine a neighbour had built on it; Mr Ruffer also knew he had to have it.

STEAMING AHEAD: The Stockton & Darlington Railway appears in the Kynren nightshow

“Its proximity to what we were doing at the castle made me think we had to buy it and then we had to work out how we might use it to make Bishop Auckland a centre of entertainment,” he said. “The intention was always, rather like water cascading down a hill, was to go with it wherever the dynamics took us.”

He became aware of the Puy de Fou in La Vendee region of France. It is a giant historical themepark with a nightshow that uses a ruined chateau as its backdrop. It is one of France’s largest attractions, visited by 2.5 million people a year.

“When I met Philippe de Villiers, who had started it in 1978, I asked him why he had done it and he said: ‘For the glory of God and the regeneration of La Vendee’,” says Mr Ruffer.

“And I said: ‘Crikey, that’s exactly what I want to do for Bishop Auckland’. That was a real toots and baps moment when everything came together.”

The plan for an open air nightshow with a cast of at least 600 volunteers was announced in April 2014, and was greeted with warm scepticism. “When the idea first came up, it was two million to one against it ever getting off the ground,” he says. “This time last year, it was 28,000 to one against, and now it looks like it is going to happen.”

The first paying guests will see the spectacular show, which is a riotous romp through 2,000 years of history, on Saturday night. Mr Ruffer praises his chief executive, Anne-Isabelle Daulon, and especially the 1,000 volunteers who have made it happen.

“We have a great community of volunteers who have thrown themselves into it,” he said. “Without them it would not happen but with them it is a world beater.

“It will become an annual event and we will become slicker and more adept. Every year, new things will be added. The simply astonishing aspect of France is that people come back again and again each year, and that’s the position we must get to.”

It feels like Bishop Auckland is on the rise again – just like William the Conqueror’s enormous longboat rises out of the manmade lake in the middle of the 7.5 acre Kynren stage.