Award win for 'mummy's bridge' engineer

An award-winning engineer who helped build a landmark bridge in her home city, has said working on the structure was "probably the best thing that I've done".

Amy Dillon, from Sunderland, was part of the team who helped construct the Northern Spire in the city between 2015 and 2018 and revealed her young children proudly refer to it as "mummy's bridge".

Now based in Northern Ireland, Ms Dillon won the Women's Engineering Society Prize at the Institution of Engineering and Technology's Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards on Thursday.

She said it was a "real pinch me moment" and she was very proud to have played a part in the regeneration of Sunderland.

Ms Dillon said winning was "surreal" and an "acknowledgement" of her work.

Recalling her time as a senior site engineer looking after the Pallion side of the crossing, the 35-year-old said: "It was intense.

"A lot of the time we had to work evening and weekends because it was such a big, complex project."

At the time, the structure linking Castletown and Pallion was the first bridge to be built in the city for more than 40 years.

Opened to traffic in August 2018, its pylon is twice as high as the Millennium Bridge in Gateshead and taller than Big Ben's clock tower.

"It isn't just a straight forward bridge that goes across," Ms Dillon said.

"It is an amazing piece of engineering that we should be very proud of as a region.

"It represents all of the fantastic heritage and engineers who've come before us in the region.

"I know at the beginning people didn't really understand it, but I do think it really represents what the bridge is really about."

Ms Dillon, who met her husband on the Northern Spire project, said at first her children could not believe she had helped build the bridge.

"They call it mummy's bridge and every time they see any bridge they ask if mummy and daddy have built that."

Ms Dillon said she was originally planning to study biology but a sixth-form trip to Lesotho changed that.

While there, she noticed some people were living in houses made of corrugated iron.

The material is not a good insulator, so during the day the homes would get very hot and at night they would be very cold.

"I thought, even at 17, there must be a better way of doing this," she said.

"It really stuck with me."

Back in Sunderland, she started researching building materials and decided to pursue an engineering career.

She said it was not "the easiest start" as she found herself the only female on her first site, as well as being one of the youngest.

"It was tough and I wasn't actually sure if I wanted to continue with civil engineering, " Ms Dillon said.

"I've dedicated my life since then to making sure that nobody else feels like that.

"All of the work that I do is to provide a visible role model so someone who is female, someone who is from Sunderland, someone who might not necessarily see themselves in engineering can look at me, look at the people I work with and think 'okay they're doing it, I can do it too'."

Ms Dillon founded not-for-profit The Big Bridge, which takes a 13-metre buildable bridge kit to schools and community groups to inspire the next generation of engineers.

She described herself as passionate about the regeneration of Sunderland and added: "I do think that the Northern Spire was the beginning of that.

"I do hope that Sunderland continues to transform. I'm just very proud to have been a very, very small part of that at the beginning."

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