The Cluster: co-working space

This illustration was commissioned at the end of 2024 by Kevin Jessup, the owner of The Cluster, Summertown, Oxford: the community’s newest co-working and outdoor event space. Kevin supports local artists and he wanted an illustration of this very interesting building to hang in the entrance area of the co-working space with an option to use it on promotional material at a later date.

I had just completed the Inktober month-long drawing project about Oxford and initially imagined it would be similar in scope to one of those drawings, but it soon became apparent that the building and the history deserved a much bigger effort, and here is what I came up with.

The invitation to ‘see what came out of my brain’, a lot of research and plenty of scribbling on bits of paper to get the content sorted before the final inking led to this definitive depiction of the building from the Big Bang right up to the present day. .