Dawn Gilfillan Photography

This personal project is about Blast beach, near Seaham, in North East England. Blast beach was one of County Durham's "black beaches", where thousands of tons of coal mining waste was dumped from the nearby pit at Dawdon. If you've ever watched the film "Get Carter", the final apocalyptic scenes on the beach were filmed just down the coast from Blast, at Blackhall.

Over the years, Blast beach has started to recover from the waste dumping, and is gradually returning to a beach again. I love going there because it's almost like an alien planet with all the strong colours and textures - in fact, it was the inspiration for (and composited opening scene) of the prison planet in Sir Ridley Scott's film "Alien 3".