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 geographic feature on Earth had been painstakingly hand-painted onto 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 globemaking 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 an expensive, untouchable antique or a mass-produced globe riddled with errors. He couldn't find a company making one-off bespoke globes.
He decided to make two globes on his own, learning mostly by trial and error how to make plaster spheres, stretch wet paper across a rounded surface, and design maps with exact measurements. The two globes took two years to finish, but Bellerby was hooked — the experience revealed a gap in the globemaking market, and he feared the traditional art had been lost. "So I thought I'd give it a go," he 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: produce what would be its largest-ever handmade globe for the lobby of its new museum. The globe had to highlight the world's natural features and meet the Society's strict cartographic standards — and be completed in just nine months.
Smaller globes take around a year to make, but "the team was up for the challenge," Bellerby said.
The first step in globemaking is manufacturing a sphere using bespoke molds, casting two halves in glass-reinforced plastic. The surface is then sanded so printed maps can be glued on.
Next comes printing an incredibly detailed 2D map file for the painters to use as a guide. These maps include most geographic features on Earth, but details that align on a screen can misalign once wrapped around a sphere, so cartographers check every label and river width for accuracy.
Wrapping a flat piece of paper around a sphere is nearly impossible, so globemakers use a geometric solution: the printed maps are hand-cut into slices called gores, shaped like surfboards or orange peel slices to minimize distortion. For this project, globemakers used 24 gores spanning about eight feet of paper, lightly painted before being applied, with special attention to the many shades of blue needed for the oceans.
The gores were then carefully stretched over the blank sphere — a delicate process, since one false move, or a shift in temperature and humidity, could tear or misalign them. It took two globemakers working together to apply the gores without damaging the paper.
Once dry, more layers of watercolor paint are applied, combining transparent watercolor and gouache to color every land mass and body of water. Place-names, printed in the official National Geographic typeface, are painted over during this step. Near the end, Society cartographers visited to fact-check every hand-painted detail against their standards.
Finally, the globe was mounted on its base. Bellerby & Co uses a range of materials for bases, but this one needed to support the weight of a 100-pound spinning sphere.
They chose an almost equally heavy 150-pound metal base produced by a Formula One fabricator, which took six people to move into place before the globe was lifted into the air and positioned on top.
From celestial globes to artistic interpretations of the moon, Bellerby & Co uses modern and traditional techniques to create globes of all shapes and sizes. Most handcrafted pieces end up in private residences, so having one on public display was a special opportunity. "This is unbelievable, fantastic," Bellerby says, beaming at his team's finished work.
You can see the globe at the Museum of Exploration in Washington, D.C.