Why people still buy globes, and how making them can be a ‘political minefield’ of disputed borders and sensitive countries
- Globes help us ‘find our place in the cosmos’, one maker says, which helps them survive in this age of Google Earth and GPS
- But there is no international standard for a correctly drawn earth, and some countries are highly sensitive about how their territory is depicted
Find a globe in your local library or classroom and try this: close your eyes, spin it and drop a finger randomly on its curved, glossy surface.
You are likely to pinpoint a spot in the water, which covers 71 per cent of the planet. Maybe you will alight on a place you have never heard of – or a spot that no longer exists after a war or because of climate change.
In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate your position, and cars with built-in GPS, there is something about a globe – a spherical representation of the world in miniature – that somehow endures.
London globemaker Peter Bellerby thinks the human yearning to “find our place in the cosmos” has helped globes survive their original purpose – navigation – and the internet.
He says it is part of the reason he went into debt making a globe for his father’s 80th birthday in 2008. The experience helped inspire his company, which 16 years later employs a team of about two dozen artists, cartographers and woodworkers.
“You don’t go onto Google Earth to get inspired,” Bellerby says in his airy studio, surrounded by dozens of globes in various languages and states of completion. “A globe is very much something that connects you to the planet that we live on.”