St Ignatius spurs City philanthropist

JONATHAN RUFFER, the City investment adviser and philanthropist, says he was inspired to bankroll the £60 million re­development of the former palace of the Bishop of Durham during an Ignatian retreat at St Beuno’s College in North Wales four years ago, writes Paul Wilkinson.

“It was a very important moment for me,” said Mr Ruffer, who now splits his week equally between the City and Auckland Castle in County Durham, and describes himself as an Evangelical Christian. “It was a realisation, which I absolutely had not seen coming, that I had got to the stage of my life where I needed to step back from working in the City.”

However, he discovered that by being prepared “to step out into the void” he could do both. “It was the willingness to give it up that was the key,” he said.

In 2012 Mr Ruffer, pictured, who has roots in the North-East, responded to local outrage at plans by the Church Commissioners to sell 12 paintings by the ­seventeenth-century Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán that had hung at the castle for more than 200 years.

He paid £19 million for the pictures and building together, and is now using the castle to realise his vision that helping depressed communities is not simply achieved by throwing money at them, but by giving them something inspirational to lift their ambitions.

“It’s quite difficult to help ­people who are leading ­anaesthetically boring lives with money,” he said. “Money does two things – it makes them dependent, but it is also unfair. I might give money to one, but not to another, simply because I did not know the other existed. You have to regenerate a group indirectly. I have always felt that beauty can act as a ‘circuit breaker’.”

To that end, he says, he has embarked on a scheme to make the castle and its town, Bishop Auckland, into a tourist destination and has set up the Auckland Castle Trust.

His ambitions include a ­collaboration with the Prado Museum in Madrid for an art gallery in the town to house the Zurbaráns and Spanish religious art from his own ­collection, and a deal with Durham University to create a visual arts centre.

“I found that as I got on, without ever becoming a Catholic, the meditative side has become the most important thing,” he said. “The thing that was always a blockage for me was prayer, then it suddenly came together about five years ago. I basically pray the Collects, a good Anglican ­tradition.”