Jennie Rawlings

The Ladies Bridge

Directed by Karen Livesey

Assitant Director Kirsty McLeod

Director of Photography Peter Emery

Set Design by Jennie Rawlings

Costume Design by Anne-Marie Bigby & Leila Ransley

Produced by Jo Wiser & Rosa Rogers

A documentary celebrating the role of women involved in construction work in Britain during the Second World War. While plenty of documentation exists to acknowledge the thousands of women who worked in service jobs such as in the Land Army, on the buses and in the post office, there is no such official record of the considerable number of women who helped to construct buildings and other structures like London's Waterloo Bridge.

And yet, the riverboat pilots on the Thames still refer to Waterloo Bridge as "The Ladies Bridge" in tribute to the hundreds of female welders, joiners, bricklayers and general laborers who made its reconstruction possible between 1939 and 1945.

Karen Livesey's documentary tells their story and the story of some 24,000 other women construction workers through footage, archive material, reconstruction and interviews with some of the ladies who were there and whose achievements history has almost entirely ignored.

Screened at the National Film Theatre on Saturday 11th November 2006.