A new exhibition showing how the North-East won its £10m battle of the beaches to reclaim the coastline in the face of industrial pollution opens tomorrow.

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 of the County have been dramatically transformed by the £10million Turning the Tide project.

And photographer Keith Pattinson, poet Katrina Porteous and painter Robert Soden, were each commissioned to work as individual artists during the dramatic 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 resulting exhibition opens at the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Durham Art Gallery at Aykley Heads today and will run until June 6. "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,'' said gallery curator Dennis Hardingham.

For over 100 years the coal industry was the economic mainstay of the area. 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.

But 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 another planet in Alien 3.

The closure of the collieries in the early 1990s led to the advent of the Turning the Tide Partnership.

Between 1997 and 2002, the scheme peeled back a century of debris to reveal a unique landscape, wildlife habitat, ancient woodland and 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 also highlighted at the United Nations World Summit for Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, two years ago where delegates heard a presentation on the five-year project's success in removing 1.5 million tonnes of coal spoil that was blackening the county's beaches.