A £1.5 MILLION project is aiming to put arts and culture into the heart of communities and make residents proud of their heritage.

Northern Heartlands is one of 16 places across England that will collectively receive £20 million from the Great Place Scheme – a National Lottery-funded programme to ensure that investment in arts and culture also has the biggest possible impact on local economies, jobs, education, community cohesion and health and wellbeing.

The project is based in Barnard Castle, but also covers the rest of Teesdale, Weardale, Bishop Auckland, Willington, Crook, Tow Law and Shildon.

It follows the successful lottery-funded Heart of Teesdale (HoT) Landscape Partnership project, which explored, celebrated and conserved Teesdale’s “unique landscape and cultural heritage” from 2011 until 2016.

Visit County Durham are now working in partnership with the team behind the HoT and the symposium Artists, Farmers and Philosophers – HoT’s concluding event – to deliver the project.

It’s five team members are led by director, Jill Cole, who said she was passionate about getting arts and culture at the forefront of communities and has some exciting projects in the pipeline.

Mrs Cole said: "We are really a legacy of the HoT programme which looked at the landscape from a heritage point of view, but we always had a focus on arts and culture."

She added: "To have the opportunity to nurture these through this project, in this beautiful and diverse area, is such an exciting prospect.

"Northern Heartlands is truly a great place – not only does it include stunning landscapes, but it has been inspirational in the origins of the industrial revolution, from the coal it generated to power the nation to the trains that transported us into another age.

"We have such a rich cultural heritage and as part of Northern Heartlands, we have the opportunity to embrace this through community engagement and creative projects to encourage a sense of place."

The project, which was officially launched in August and will run until 2020, held its first event last month - a play called Town Planning where the audience had to tackle difficult planning decisions.

Mrs Cole said future projects would explore a range of topics in different ways to "empower those who live and work here to have the confidence and resources to be able to influence policy and decision-making, without feeling like it’s too elitist or that they are unable to have an input".

For more information visit northernheartlands.org