Supporting British Industry & Craftsmanship
The company employs cartographers, painters, and carpenters to handcraft bespoke terrestrial, celestial, and planetary globes.
Peter Bellerby started the company in 2008 when he couldn’t find the perfect globe as a gift for his father’s birthday. Bellerby & Co. now supplies customers from all around the world who commission bespoke, painstakingly hand-painted globes.
Today Bellerby's twenty five globemakers, painters, woodworkers, metalworkers and cartographers make 600-700 globes a year, in a working mews in Stoke Newington.
The pieces of maps - known as gores - are carefully glued to each perfectly spherical globe. Each sphere is made in-house from resins, Perspex and plaster of Paris sometimes inlaid with hessian fibres, using a mould created by Formula 1 fabricators. The painters then apply layers of watercolour to represent oceans, mountain ranges and vegetation. It can take 6-8 weeks to paint a big globe. Personalised globes are now in the hands of heads of state, Hollywood actors and a geologist who wanted an Ice Age one. Some globes stand on wooden bases turned by Nichols Brothers (also featured in The Archive).
"This was a fascinating workspace to visit, a very quiet and calm one with a look of pure concentration on each of the workers' faces." Carmel King photographed Bellerby & Co in September 2021 for Made in London, the images also appear in The Globemakers published by Bloomsbury.
