Six Triple Eight: Kerry Washington is spotted in Yorkshire as Bradford's Little Germany is transformed into World War Two film set

Office workers who had been asked to block their windows in the city’s historic Little Germany district were excited to catch a glimpse of the American actress in 1940s military uniform on the streets outside.

She is starring alongside Oprah Winfrey and Susan Sarandon in Six Triple Eight, a new Netflix thriller directed by Tyler Perry – a close friend of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The filming block in the Conservation Area – once the warehouses of German-Jewish merchants who moved to Bradford in the 19th century – is now in full swing and the area is full of extras and crew as well as 1940s props and sets.

The movie tells the story of the 855 black American women assigned to a racially segregated ‘postal directory’ unit during World War Two and given the task of sorting through a three-year backlog of undelivered mail for US service personnel. They succeeded in clearing 17 million letters and parcels and sending them on to soldiers during their deployment to Britain in 1945, when they were based in Birmingham. They were then posted to France and spent the remainder of the war sorting mail in Rouen and Paris.

Little Germany has appeared in many other productions – it stood in for 1990s Moscow in The Crown and 1930s Glasgow in All Creatures Great and Small, and featured in Gentleman Jack.

Yorkshire Post photographer Tony Johnson was on set on Thursday.