The Project Auckland
Bishop Auckland, County Durham, was once the playground of the second most powerful man in England. Powerful men don’t usually like to share and, for centuries, the castle here kept its doors firmly locked. The inhabitants of the small market town took it in their stride – they were more interested in life around the nearby coalmines anyway. When the pits closed in the 1960s, Bishop Auckland, like so many other mining towns, began to fade away. It would take a new vision to begin to turn things around.
From early medieval times the Bishops of Durham answered only to the king himself. Granted exceptional power to govern the North of England they became ‘Prince
