The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft

Our planet is remarkable. I have always been intrigued by the notion that life on Earth is made possible by the coincidence amongst others of the Earth’s distance from our star – the sun, the make-up of the atmosphere, its orbit around the sun, the length of its rotation and the precise angle of its tilt as it rotates, because if any one of these factors changed by a fraction, it would probably be a barren pile of desolate rocks, not unlike Mars.

‘I WANTED TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE WORLD WORKS’

As a child I didn’t read many novels; I had a vivid imagination but make-believe stories were not the medium to transport me. I was much more interested in facts. I would read any book on space, science and natural history. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, with my father working abroad for much of the year, I would spend hours in his vacant study, avoiding homework and poring over his collection of encyclopedias and illustrated books on the natural world. I wanted to understand how the world works. Like a lot of children, I was fascinated by the universe – and by extension, globes, the only accurate representation of our planet. I used to pester my parents to buy one of those garish 1970s numbers that you’d see in the Sunday supplements, which opened up to reveal a drinks cabinet, one of the few large floor-standing globes available at the time.

My interest in globes has been a constant ever since. I use Google Maps every day – to find my way to a new part of town or check something online – but it doesn’t replace the apparently old-fashioned globe; for me the modern digital map and the globe perform completely different functions. You never use a globe today for directions, and when you look at a map on your phone, you never experience the same awed feeling as you do when you hold a globe in your hand or spin it on its axis. Google Maps might inform, but a globe inspires. Perhaps this is because it gives you a different perspective from a flat map of the world. Whereas on many two-dimensional maps the focus seems to fall on Europe as the apparent centre of the world, the globe is a spherical object on which there can be no preordained centre, and thus each place is of equal significance. In that way, they help us to understand where we are in relation to the rest of the world. Globes remind us of how minuscule – and insignificant – we are. And how wonderful the world is, a beautiful planet floating in space, spinning within an infinite universe and an evolution of time so long that it is hard to comprehend. The concept of time is difficult enough to fathom when related to a 2,000-year-old giant sequoia tree, let alone a 4.5-billion-year-old planet.

‘IN EARLY 2008 I DECIDED I WANTED TO BUY MY FATHER A GLOBE FOR HIS UPCOMING EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY’

In early 2008 I decided I wanted to buy my father a globe for his upcoming eightieth birthday. He was very traditional, not easy to buy presents for; he viewed them with suspicion, finding fault with most. Over the years, I had mainly bought him practical things like socks, ties and nice bottles of gin, but sometimes (quite often) nothing. It was simpler to be labelled forgetful or ungrateful than to buy him something unappreciated. After his mother had refused him permission to join Luton Town as a professional footballer in the 1940s, seeing it as a poor choice of profession (he later did the same to my elder brother), he trained as a naval architect, working firstly at Cammell Laird on Merseyside, then at BP Shipping for more than twenty-five years. I thought a globe would be something he might really engage with. If I found the right one, it might even, I thought, make up for all the missed years. His birthday was a few months away, so I started looking.

First stop was Stanfords, the famous map shop, then on Long Acre in London’s Covent Garden. They stocked plenty of brightly coloured classroom-quality globes, perfectly functional and not very expensive, but these were not going to work, not for a landmark birthday. There were a couple of businesses making globes in the UK and America, but either the quality and aesthetic was not what I had in mind, and I was left wondering how anyone could make them so cheaply, or they produced not unattractive one-off faux-antique globes (along with other ‘medieval’ props) for movie sets that relied on ageing techniques (shoe polish, coloured varnish and tea) and soft-focus filming to disguise the lack of finesse. I then visited a few auction houses, where I watched the bidding for antique globes rise to tens of thousands of pounds, sheepishly hiding my paddle when I dropped out early on. I hadn’t planned on spending that sort of money, but equally didn’t see the point in having a globe that was decades if not centuries out of date and fragile to the point of being almost untouchable. These delicate antique artefacts belong in museums and stately homes. Besides, I knew my father, and he always favoured functionality over aesthetics. He had little interest in historical context.

Later that year, in June 2008, I resigned from my job at the central London ten-pin bowling venue I had helped a friend set up three years earlier (and subsequently been press-ganged into managing), packed my bags and set out on a backpacking trip with my partner Jade. We included several nations on the trip – India, Egypt, Morocco – where artisans working in small factories still flourish alongside street markets, bazaars and souks. At each stop on our six-month trip, we looked around in the hope that somewhere I might stumble on my perfect gift. In Marrakesh we visited small and busy artisanal workshops in simple houses with rudimentary foundries in back rooms. There we watched workers shape cast brass pieces by hand, terrifyingly, on what looked like hand-built, open-geared lathes, with razor-sharp shards flying in all directions. No gloves, no safety glasses in sight!

‘THERE SEEMED TO BE NO ONE MAKING BEAUTIFUL MODERN GLOBES BY HAND’

I was convinced that I would find something for Dad in India. On a previous trip around Rajasthan, I’d seen all manner of crafts in remote villages. Just outside Jodhpur we found the most amazing source of Indian antiques in Suncity Art, a space spanning the size of many football pitches. We spent a day there, buying several beautiful items but no globes. On the last leg, we ended up in Cairo. We spent hours wandering around the souks in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili mesmerised by the masses of hand-worked wooden chess boards, bone- and shell-inlaid boxes and other trinkets. But apart from a few simple antique brass celestial globes in Morocco, I found nothing suitable as a gift for my father. It was hard to believe that among the myriad of handicrafts we encountered on our travels, there seemed to be no one making beautiful modern globes by hand.

I had two options: a cheap, modern political globe (also available with a generous coat of sepia colouring and imaginatively labelled ‘antique’) or an expensive and very fragile actual antique. Hobson’s choice.

Ever since I was quite young, I had one plan, and that was to work for myself. It is not that I don’t like taking instruction (fact check: the truth is, maybe I don’t like taking instruction) or being asked to do a task, I just don’t like anyone telling me how to do the task. The most fun part of any job, by far, is working out the most efficient way to do it, though this won’t necessarily be the quickest way first time round, as tests are necessary. And yes, I can see that in many professions this might be a very bad approach.

In 2001, aged thirty-six, I was made redundant from my position at ITV with a very generous severance deal and so was fortunate enough to finally get the chance to take control of my own destiny. I bought, single-handedly renovated and then sold a couple of houses over several years. While I made nothing on one property, I did well on the other, albeit due more to an upturn in the market than my handiwork. Along the way I had learned quite a bit about materials and machinery, which would later prove valuable.

THE ATLAS

A collection of maps has been called an atlas since the 1500s, when cartographer Gerard Mercator put a picture of Atlas holding up the Earth on the title page of his book.

In Greek mythology, the Titan Atlas, brother of Prometheus and Epimetheus, was the father of the Hesperides, the Pleiades, the Hyades and the nymph Calypso. He was the leader of the Titan rebellion against Zeus, the Olympian god of the sky and thunder. After the Olympians defeated the Titans in battle, as punishment Zeus condemned Atlas to stand for eternity, holding up the heavens (not the Earth as depicted in Mercator's book). According to the Greek poet Hesiod (c.750–650 BCE), Atlas stood at the western end of the Mediterranean, the edge of the known world. The ocean beyond was called the Sea of Atlas, or the Atlantic, in his honour.

Over time Atlas also became associated with north-west Africa, particularly Morocco. In 8 CE, in Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote that Atlas received a visit from Perseus, son of Zeus and slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, who asked for shelter. Because of a prophecy that a son of Zeus would one day steal the golden apples from his daughters, the Hesperides, Atlas turned him away. Insulted, Perseus showed him the severed head of Medusa, which had the power to turn all who looked at it into stone. Atlas too was turned into stone, and became the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

Arriving back home after our travels in late 2008, I didn’t have much on my agenda. Even with my total lack of financial acumen and general disregard for risk, I knew a financial crisis was not a good time to re-enter the property market, which had been my original plan. The economic crisis did however give me a little help. Bear with me on this. It’s about mortgages so I’ll keep it very short. In 2008 the Bank of England lowered interest rates to 0.5%. My mortgage repayments were calculated at 0.51% under this rate. I therefore found myself in the very odd position of my mortgage provider actually paying me to live in my own house. I was only making around fifty pounds a month and it was only for eight months, so I wasn’t quite quids in, but in the short term the pressure to earn a living was off.

Before deciding on my next career move, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to devote some time to a little project, which I could do simply by increasing my overdraft. So, for the next few months, while I waited for some financial certainty to return, but without any consideration as to whether it was feasible, I decided to handmake a globe for Dad myself. Actually, I wanted to get it done so I could resume earning a living. I’d missed his actual birthday by now so there was no rush, but even I could not have envisaged the scale of the task on which I was about to embark, nor the length of time it would take to complete.

I put my plan in action at a meeting with two friends in a King’s Cross pub. One, Jon, I asked to do a simple bit of coding by writing a program to morph a flat map into gores (more on this later), and the other, Kelley, agreed to help part-time for a few months. I decided that I would make two globes, one for Dad, one for me. This increased to three when I realised the easiest way to pay Jon (the morpher) was to offer him a globe as recompense for his work. At this point I estimated it would take three to four months and cost a few thousand pounds. How difficult can it be to make a sphere and put a map on it, I reasoned? It never really crossed my mind why there might not be other globemakers doing everything by hand and that the process might be difficult. In truth, I was quite convinced that once I had made my globe, I would find other artisan makers around the world, but regardless it seemed like a fun project.

I began my research online. On YouTube there were some hilarious