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A WORLD APARTAbove and on previous page, globes from Bellerby & Co’s Mini Desk and Livingstone collections, which start from £1,074 (Dh6,000). Below, each globe gets countless washes of watercolour. Here, the shading on Australia is being hand-painted. Opposite page, Peter Bellerby working on a handcrafted globe in his London studio.

Paradoxically, considering it was the dawn of the jet and nuclear age, it was a two-millennia-old piece of apparatus that was best placed to achieve that shift. Globes were used to provide the new understanding of direction, scale and distance that was required by London and Washington.

For the London-based artisan Peter Bellerby, a man whose career has become inextricably linked with the Weber Costello globe that was presented to Churchill, the perennial appeal of globes lies in their perspective-changing power and ability to explain relationships and adjacencies in ways static maps cannot.

“Every map involves an element of error because it’s a projection,” the softly spoken Englishman explains. “A projection involves taking the globe, unfurling it and creating a projection so that it sits flat on a wall. The Mercator projection, for example, makes the latitude lines much larger towards the poles so that Canada, Greenland and Antarctica appear absolutely huge, whereas on a globe they are geographically correct.”

Globes have certainly had a transformative effect on Bellerby’s career. When the 49-year-old first attempted globemaking seven years ago, he was working as the boss of an upmarket tenpin bowling alley in central London and, just like Gen Marshall, he was in search of a special gift.

“My dad’s 80th birthday was coming up and I thought it would be a nice idea to get him a globe for his study,” Bellerby explains. However, after a two-year search, the Londoner was thwarted by the absence of accurate, high-quality terrestrial globes that “weren’t mass-produced” or “500-year-old antiques”.

The gap in the market persuaded Bellerby to try making his own. He set himself what he considered to be a generous time limit – four months – and a “more than generous” budget of £5,000 (Dh27,900) for the globe, but it wasn’t long before he realised that both estimations were woefully inadequate.

“Things got totally out of hand,” he admits. “I didn’t

even tell anyone I was doing it for the first four or five months, other than my girlfriend, who had to live in a plaster of Paris-filled house every day.

“It eventually took 18 months and more than £150,000 [Dh834,000] to produce the first globe, by which time I had decided that I was going to turn it into a company.”

One of Bellerby’s greatest challenges was the rediscovery of skills that had been lost from an industry that had all but disappeared.

“The last decent globes were made in the 1930s but the last that were made entirely by hand date from much further back, so I knew at the very beginning that there was nobody around who could help me.

“The difficultly I had was that none of the current breed of commercial globemakers are producing anything close to a perfect globe. There are makers whose maps overlap to such an extent that they wipe out entire countries.”

Of all the processes involved in the creation of a handmade globe, it was the application of map sections, or gores, to the globe’s surface that Bellerby found most challenging.

“The whole thing was a process of trial and error. You have triangular pieces of paper that you have to wet and then stretch so they fit over a sphere without any creases. You can imagine the difficulties in doing that.

“Initially I was also making globes from plaster of Paris and it took half a day to make each globe, spread over three or four days. I then had to apply the maps and if I made a mistake I had to throw the whole thing away.”

Bellerby’s other main challenge was finding a manufacturer who could make a perfect sphere. “This was the beginning of my introduction to the world of tolerance,” the craftsman says. “I found several companies prepared to make a 50-centimetre sphere mould, but the moulds weren’t round and were far from accurate.”