The future of OPD is bigger and brighter
Back
We’ve moved! You’ll now be able to find us in our new office at 13 Beaumont Street, just a few doors down from the Randolph Hotel, Oxford Playhouse and Ashmolean Museum.
A big move for OPD
Aside from being on the same street as some of Oxford’s most established and well-loved sites, the new space signifies an exciting time in OPD’s history.
We made the move in order to consolidate our offices, which were split over two sites, and bring the company to a more prominent location in the centre of Oxford. As Rupert Wilkinson, OPD’s Managing Director, explains:
"Being on Beaumont Street offers an exciting opportunity for OPD to continue to grow. With the extra 1000 square feet we’ve increased the size of our workshop and model making capabilities… We believe this space will allow us to delight our customers even more and hope it will attract the very best talent."
Our new space will allow us to continue diversifying our offering whilst enabling us to have an even greater impact on the projects we work on. This means, among other positives, having more space for prototyping and model making as well as being able to work on physically larger products.
Using our space well
We successfully embraced home working during the lockdown, and we’re continuing to support this alongside the new office setting. However, we’ve missed the free-flowing collaboration and exchange of ideas that happen when we’re actually working together in person.
Being in the new office has changed the way we work as a team and as individuals. Where we were previously all together in an open plan space, we now have a larger amount of space split across several room and floors.
It’s a very different environment that "offers more of a ‘campus style’ setup, where the team can choose an area to work in depending on what they want to achieve," says Operations Director, Clare Wilkinson. "These dedicated areas include a project build space, a larger workshop, 3D Printing technologies, creative brainstorming areas, a range of individual spaces for some peace and quiet to work on a problem, and social areas where ideas can be shared."
What do the team think?
We chatted to some of the team to get their thoughts on the new office:
"The main thing about having a shared space that’s big enough is that it feels safe and secure to come back to work and, obviously, in a creative industry it’s great to be able to bounce ideas around a table, it’s really hard to do that on video calls."
James Bennett, Design Consultant
"The location is pretty awesome, you can see Gloucester Green from the windows. For me, we’re now a five-minute walk from a client that we work with, so that’s really great, and, the fact that we’ve got parking here is amazing.
It's great that we’ve got enough space to be able to be back in the office without the social distancing risks, we can all be here without stepping on each other’s toes. It just wasn’t possible in the old office. It’s nice that we can get some of the collaboration back.
The building is enormously impressive, and I think it really reflects the size and professionalism of OPD."
Damian Holland, Design and Development Consultant
"I’m really exciting to be back in the workshop. You become an engineer because you like hammers and spanners and now we’ve got space for more hammers and spanners, it’s great.
Also, we’re now obviously at a much better location. It’s on Beaumont Street, a very historic part of Oxford, in a bigger office - everything about it is bigger and better and it just makes it feel like the entire company is on an upwards swing, it’s really exciting to be a part of that."
Neil Robinson, Consultant Mechanical Engineer