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.
