Player blog - Hammond combines spin bowling with studies
10 November 2015
In the first player blog of the close season allrounder Miles Hammond talks about his decision to combine his cricket career with an architecture degree at the prestigious Central St Martins art school in London.
I made the decision to go to university in London and study architecture right at the start of the 2015 season.
This meant that I could really concentrate on the season ahead, knowing what my plan was for the next couple of years.
The reason I decided to go down this route was simply to add something else to my life, something outside of cricket.
From a practical point of view, I also thought it would take some of the pressure off and help me to enjoy cricket, knowing I have something to fall back on if the worst comes to worst.
Even though I am going to uni, my priority this winter is still my cricket and it was really important that I organised a place to train.
I have been lucky enough that Gloucestershire have embraced my decision to go to university. They helped me to contact the MCC Young Cricketers and arrange to train with them at Lord’s over the winter, which is a huge privilege
I never intended to study architecture at university, it was more something that I stumbled upon. I had been planning to do geography but decided I’d had enough of that.
I started to do bits of drawing and painting at home during the winter of 2014/15 and quickly found that I was interested in design.
My dad suggested that I look into architecture and a psychological profile I had done also suggested that I was suited to some kind of design work.
I started working with my dad in December and handed in a portfolio to different universities in February and March, all in London. I got accepted by three and decided to go with Central St Martins which is based in Kings Cross and part of the University of Arts, London.
Once the season was over I only had a couple of days until I enrolled at university and started my course. I couldn’t wait to start and was really looking forward to my first lectures and the projects that followed.
Our latest project is a live one, this means we are working for an actual client – cycling firm Rapha. This is a worldwide business, which holds ‘Cycle-cross’ events. Their next event is taking place in CSM, so we had to design an obstacle for the course. Our group of three decided upon a mini velodrome/wall of death. We are currently in the process of choosing materials and starting to build.
