We were in The Standard Newspaper – June 21st 2025! The article can also be seen online and the video on instagram (our account and theirs).
Click here for the video on Instagram
Click here for the article and video on The Standards website
It is not, perhaps, a weekly situation, to find yourself in need of a globe. But should you desire one — for sprucing up a flat, choosing a holiday destination, revising for a game of Risk — only a few options present themselves. You could hunt for a secondhand one on Facebook marketplace or in an antiques shop. If you’re lucky, there might be one at a car boot sale. But for a brand new one, there are really only two options. You can buy a standard ready-made globe, the kind that stationers sometimes sell. Flimsy, lightweight, shiny, plastic. Or you can go bespoke: beautiful, substantial. Proper. Bellerby & Co, one of the few producers left, does the latter. It is a master in its field.
But Bellerby & Co is not a quaint old family business or dusty relic — it was founded in 2008, in a tucked-away corner of Stoke Newington. Bellerby is Peter Bellerby, who started it all partly out of frustration. Wanting to buy a globe for his father’s 80th birthday, he could find only antique versions, at astonishing prices, or the feeble kind used by students before Google Maps. The answer was to make his own, and so he did. Two, the plan was — one for him, one for his dad. How hard could it be? He reasoned a few months of labour and a few thousand pounds in cost. His reasoning was wrong: in the end, it took two years and, he says, his life savings. What had seemed easy was anything but: finding a sphere proved almost impossible, an accurate map even harder.
Photo by Euan Myles
What began as a well-intentioned hobby became something of an obsession, an obsession that has become a business. Now, Bellerby & Co has a proud team of 30 artisans, made up of cartographers, woodworkers, metalworkers, painters and sphere-makers, who all work in harmony to recreate the world as art. Each new team member starts as an apprentice, often training for more than a year before they can work on even the smallest globes. Everything is entirely bespoke. “We make terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes,” Bellerby explains. The workshop is magical; surreal even — a document of this world but hardly feeling part of it. Globes of all sizes are displayed around the space. The air moves with the gentle hum of drills from downstairs, where staff craft wood and materials. Upstairs, artists are painting, illustrating, designing and manually assembling the components of the globes. It’s a painstakingly precise process.
The workshop is magical; surreal even — a document of this world
The journey of each globe begins with cartography. “Every globe is a new map for a new customer,” says Bellerby. The world is as it is, and yet no two are quite the same. Clients might want to trace personal journeys across continents, add family heritage routes, or mark spots with tiny illustrations of homes, animals, or even quotes. “Some of the most interesting ones are people putting their life stories on a globe. It’s a powerful way of holding on to family history,” Bellerby says.
