Created in September 2002, the BMU is an association promoting the candidacy of the Nord-Pas de Calais Coalfield for World Heritage List.

The BMU official launching in January 2003

For the association and its partners, the exceptional recognition accorded by the World Heritage Committee is likely to stimulate constructive dynamism for the future of the region and its population. This step constitutes a real contribution towards regenerating the Mining area through several closely related themes: knowledge and recognition of mining and industrial heritage; a change of image to foster renewed appeal and a new public attitude towards both their living environment and themselves; and the use of mining and industrial heritage as a tool of local development. Mining lay behind the historic economic development of the region. It is now part of the region’s heritage, but the remains of this industry can also contribute to the development of new economic activity in the Coalfield. Designating this heritage as a cultural landscape certainly means recognising its heritage value and committing to preserve it, but it also means equipping the region with the additional resources to shape the cultural, social and economic future of this former industrial basin.

In order to give substance to the process and lead the technical preparation of the candidacy dossier, the association has been acting as a focal point, operating transversally and rallying around a shared project all the institutional parties – from local authorities to land agencies and development and urban generation agencies, and from charities to cultural institutions – who have been working in the region for a number of years. The BMU project is in no sense an initiative created out of nothing and is not the first time that the Coalfield heritage has been taken into consideration; it forms part of a long-standing process which has been in existence for around twenty years, and has boosted attempts to safeguard and build on the region's mining heritage.

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Alongside local and regional actors, the association is thus helping to transform what has long been seen as a handicap into an advantage, and is doing so in a sustainable development context. For three centuries, extraction did not respect the region’s “natural” and “social” environments. Today, the aim is to reconcile in a sustainable way the redevelopment and adaptation of this region to the realities of the modern world with the preservation of its historic identity, its heritage values and its environmental characteristics inherited from the process of industrialisation.