Bellerby & Co Globemakers - MorningCalM October 2018

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TERRA INCOGNITA

Bellerby & Co Globemakers creates handmade globes painted with personal illustrations and labels that mark places special to their owners. It’s the world as you’ve never seen it before — one of your own making.

George ponders a globe so colossal that it dwarfs him completely. Watercolor oceans surge against the shores of its gargantuan continents, marked with artful labels that seem to evoke a past age, when globes were a symbol of prestige and gifted to kings. Of course, the labels are unintelligible to George. He’s a four-year-old Boston terrier who’s a fixture of the rustic, light-filled London studio of Bellerby & Co Globemakers, where a team of craftspeople, painters and a cartographer create a new world for each of their clients.

The Churchill globe can weigh up to 190kg and, with a diameter of 127cm, is the biggest Bellerby & Co makes. It’s the same size as one gifted to Winston Churchill in 1942. Peter Bellerby, who founded his company in 2008, decided early on he would make only 40 of them. “I thought it was perhaps a good number,” he says. “We were only going to make two per year, so I was thinking, ‘OK, 20 years, that would be good.’” The team has completed 16 orders so far, and the Bellerby website says that there is currently a waiting list of over a year for a Churchill.

Most people have never entertained the idea of creating a globe of their own. When asked about his interests as a child, Peter gives an illuminating answer: “Taking every single toy or anything I was ever given apart, back to its components, and then managing very cleverly to put it back without utilizing all the components,” he says. “I haven’t a single toy left from my childhood.”

The culmination of this childhood hobby was perhaps putting together a whole world from scratch as a gift for his father’s 80th birthday. It wasn’t as easy as he first imagined. He had to order the perfect mold to cast perfect hemispheres, then attach the two together; a friend had to write a computer program that could convert a flat map into segments called gores that could be applied to a sphere. Peter would soon discover that placing these gores was extremely difficult. The strips had to be wet, then carefully stretched so they would all align.

After four months, he had barely figured out anything that was up to his standard. So he removed one component — the idea that this would be a onetime venture accomplished within the budget he’d originally set — and established Bellerby & Co. Around 2011, one client asked for a personal edit to their globe. “That’s very much how our company has grown,” Peter says. “As a result of people saying, ‘Can you do this?’”

The answer is almost always yes. A globe may not be a very useful navigational tool, but it turns out it makes a compelling canvas for the story of a life. Many of Bellerby’s clients mark hometowns or places they’ve traveled to with custom illustrations and labels. “We have, sometimes, globes with 50 to 60 illustrations on them,” says Peter.

One man recently commissioned a set of globes for his business partner and himself. “They had lots of things that meant something between the two of them” Peter says. “He has four dogs, and he had them piloting old-fashioned biplanes as an illustration on the globe.”

It makes you wonder what George would put on a globe of his own — here is the best park with the most interesting smells. The world, in this corner of London, can be almost anything you want it to be. That can be a problem, too. The presentation of borders has gotten some Bellerby globes rejected at customs checkpoints. And if the things you include on a globe say something about who you are, the things you exclude can say even more. Peter recalls an occasion when his company denied a request. “Someone asked me to remove a country,” he says.

Though a Bellerby globe can have fantastical personal touches, a globe in general reinforces truths about the world clouded by the flat maps we’re used to. On a globe you can see the true size of Africa, typically greatly underestimated due to the distortion of most maps, when it’s really the size of 14 Greenlands.

Peter delivered the globe to his father two years after he started trying to create one. He has since gifted a few others.”There are seven continents on the globe; the likelihood of someone commissioning one from Antarctica is quite small, so I gifted one to the British Antarctic Survey,” he says. He’s not certain whether it actually made it to the continent, but he likes to imagine that it did. Bellerby & Co will chart territories beyond Earth, too. For the past three years, it has been working on a project for the Louvre that will recreate an ethereal celestial globe given to King Louis XIV circa 1683.

Peter hasn’t designed a globe just for himself yet. “I haven’t stopped traveling yet,” he says. “It doesn’t feel right. I’m here every day trying to help people create their own globe, and at this stage, I haven’t really thought about making one for myself.” A Bellerby globe does seem to signify a coming of age — a gift to inaugurate your ninth decade on Earth. Give or take a few years.