AN exhibition showing how part of the North-East won a £10m battle to reclaim its coastline from industrial pollution opens today.

A trio of regional artists have captured the essence of the County Durham coastline during the recent period of massive change.

The coal-blackened beaches have been transformed by the £10m Turning the Tide project.

Photographer Keith Pattinson, poet Katrina Porteous and painter Robert Soden were each commissioned to record the transformation.

In 2001, designer Edward Gainford brought the three together to plan and create the exhibition Turning the Tide and a 60-page book of the same name.

The exhibition opens at the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Durham Art Gallery, at Aykley Heads, today and will run until June 6.

Gallery curator Dennis Hardingham said: "Both the exhibition and the book display the extraordinary extent to which the artists, essentially outsiders, were able to get under the skin of the district and its coastline.''

For more than 100 years, the coal industry was the economic mainstay of east Durham.

The miners and their families created communities where the pits exploited the coal seams which run out under the North Sea.

However, the presence of the industry focused attention away from the natural beauty of the area.

Indeed, the county's beaches were once so scarred by colliery tipping that they were used as film locations for Michael Caine's classic gangster movie Get Carter and for the dead landscape of a planet in Alien 3.

The closure of the collieries in the early 1990s led to the advent of the Turning the Tide Partnership, involving a range of organisations.

Between 1997 and 2002, the scheme peeled back a century of debris to reveal wildlife habitats, ancient woodland, denes and magnesian limestone grasslands.

The £10m scheme, which also created clifftop footpaths and cycle routes, was given the accolade of Heritage Coast status.

It was highlighted at the United Nations World Summit for Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, two years ago, where delegates heard about the five-year project's success in removing 1.5 million tonnes of coal spoil that was blackening the county's beaches.