On a cloudy day in central London, artisans at Bellerby & Co, Globemakers are putting the finishing touches on the largest handcrafted globe they’ve ever made. Over the previous few months, every plateau, peninsula, island, and mountain ridge on Earth had been painstakingly hand-painted on the five foot diameter 100-pound sphere. Today, a final coat of watercolor paint is laid on, but then, a new challenge arises: how to get it out of the studio.
The completed globe is so large that it doesn’t fit through the front door. Instead, a crane plucks the globe, now placed in a shipment crate, from the studio’s roof and sets it in the quiet alleyway, where it starts a transatlantic journey to be installed at the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration, opening this week.
Much about traditional globe making hasn’t changed since the 16th century. But Bellerby & Co is a relative newcomer to the craft.
In 2008, owner Peter Bellerby was working in real estate when he went searching for a handcrafted globe for his father’s 80th birthday. His only options were either purchasing an expensive antique, so fragile it couldn’t be touched, or a mass-produced globe riddled with geographic errors. He couldn’t find a company making one-off bespoke globes.
He decided to make two globes on his own, immersing himself in the meticulous craft. Bellerby learned mostly by trial and error how to make plaster spheres, stretch wet paper across a a rounded surface, and design maps with exact measurements. He didn’t complete the globes in time for his father’s 80th birthday; the two 19.5-inch globes took two years to finish. But Bellerby was hooked.
The experience revealed a gap in the globemaking market, and Bellerby feared the traditional art had been lost. “So I thought I’d give it a go,” Bellerby said.
Since then, Bellerby has evolved his process, mixing traditional and modern globemaking techniques to craft custom pieces of art. Whereas the watercolor finishes are similar to what globemakers would put on their projects centuries ago, the metal elements on their bespoke bases are precision-designed by a Formula One fabricator.
In late 2025, the nonprofit National Geographic Society cold-called the studio with a request: Could the studio produce what would be its largest-ever handmade globe for the lobby of the Society's new museum? The globe had to highlight the world’s natural features and adhere to the strict standards of the Society’s cartography department. And it had to be completed in just nine months.
Smaller globes take around a year to make, but “the team was up for the challenge,” Bellerby said
Here’s how Bellerby & Co pulled it off.
Wrapping a football
The first step in globemaking is manufacturing a sphere. Here, the company uses bespoke molds, casting two halves of the hollow sphere in glass-reinforced plastic. Then the surface is sanded so printed maps can be glued to the sphere.
Next comes the challenge of printing an incredibly detailed 2D map file that Bellerby’s painters will use as their guide. These maps include most geographic features on Earth, but details that align on a computer screen can misalign when wrapped around a sphere. So Bellerby & Co cartographers like Ollie Cameron check every detail for accuracy, from the labels to river width, ensuring they won’t get distorted when pasted onto the sphere.
Cutting the gores
Accurately wrapping a flat piece of paper around a sphere is nearly impossible. But globemakers have a geometric solution: The printed maps are hand-cut into slices called gores. Gores look like surfboards or orange peel slices—the shape allows globemakers to wrap paper around the surface with minimal distortion. Each "slice" contains a precise section of the world scaled to a specific shape and size to fit the sphere.
For the National Geographic project, globemakers used 24 gores spanning about eightfeet of paper. The gores were lightly painted before they were applied to the sphere, with careful attention on the oceans, which require many shades of blue to reflect the oceanic ridges, trenches, and rises.
Applying the gores
Next, the gores were carefully stretched over the blank sphere. Stretching wet paper is a delicate process. One false move and the gores could tear or become misaligned. What’s more, factors like temperature and humidity can affect how the paper behaves. It took a coordinated effort by two globemakers to apply the gores without damaging the paper.
Painting the world
When the gores are dry, more layers of watercolor paint are applied. Painter Kasia Ostrowski painted every land mass and body of water, combining transparent watercolor and gouache paints to achieve the right color scheme. Place-names were printed on the 2D map file in the official National Geographic typeface, then painted over again during this step. When Ostrowski was nearly done , National Geographic Society cartographers visited Bellerby & Co to manually fact-check every hand-painted detail against their strict cartographic standards.
Mounting the globe
Finally, the globe was mounted on its base. Bellerby & Co uses a range of materials for bases, but the National Geographic globe required one that would support the weight of its 100 pound spinning sphere.
They chose an almost equally heavy 150 pound metal base produced by a Formula One fabricator that took six people to move into place. Then the globe was then lifted into the air and carefully positioned on the base.
Installing the final globe
From celestial globes to artistic interpretations of the moon, Bellerby & Co employs the modern and traditional techniques to create globes of all shapes and sizes. Many of the handcrafted pieces decorate private residences, having one on display for the world to enjoy was seen as a special opportunity for Bellerby & Co.
“This is unbelievable, fantastic,” Bellerby says, beaming at his team’s finished work.
You can see the globe handcrafted by Bellerby & Co, Globemakers at the Museum of Exploration in Washington DC.
