Welcome to The World of Pleasington Farm
A timeless place of cosy wonder, where wonderful characters live inside beautifully crafted stories and hand-drawn illustrations, all made with love, care and attention to detail.
Somewhere between the words and the pictures, Pleasington Farm begins to feel as though it has always been there. Familiar, comforting, careworn and loved. Warm enough to settle into — yet often with a little mischief stirring somewhere nearby..
Books & Stories
The World of Pleasington Farm is told through picture books for children aged four to seven, each one shaped with care, written in warm, playful verse and made to be held, shared and read aloud. Within the stories there is room for humour, tenderness, silliness and the occasional shadow.
Words and pictures tell the story together. The verse carries it forward; softly rendered, richly coloured and full of feeling, the hand-drawn artwork gives it room to breathe — sometimes revealing what the words leave unsaid, sometimes quietly telling another story alongside.
Return to a book, and there is always a little more waiting to be found. Characters cross paths, background details gather meaning, and small stories continue at the edges. Each book stands happily on its own, yet takes its place within a wider world that grows richer from one story to the next.
Betsy Boo! is the first book set in The World of Pleasington Farm. Warm, funny and carefully paced, the story moves from quiet sadness to shout-out-loud chaos, with moments children can anticipate, join in with and enjoy all over again. Along the way, it introduces a host of charming characters, each with a part to play in a story that is easy to follow, yet quietly layered from beginning to end.
At its heart, Betsy Boo! is a story about being misunderstood. Betsy’s sadness is allowed to feel sad, and the silliness is properly silly. When danger arrives, a thread of playfulness lets the moment feel exciting without ever making it truly frightening. As the story unfolds, things are rarely quite as simple as they first appear — and by the final pages, warmth, laughter and a small lingering ache all find their way home together.
Meet the Creators
Rebecca Brant
Rebecca began her creative life as a singer-songwriter, performing at venues and events across the country. After gaining her PGCE, she went on to work with young people as a secondary-school teacher and pastoral leader.
The birth of her own children opened a new chapter. Songwriting began to find its way into storytelling, bringing with it Rebecca’s instinct for rhythm, feeling and the gentler corners of childhood. From that came the original story that would become Betsy Boo! The Cow Who Could Not Say Moo!
Michael Hodgkinson
Michael’s creative life also began in music. As a singer-songwriter, he developed a love of rhythm and language that later came together with drawing, storytelling and character-led world-building.
For more than twenty-five years, Michael has created and developed original IP for publishing, products and television, with work reaching audiences in the UK and internationally. One of his original properties was commissioned by BBC/CBeebies as a 52-episode animated series. In Pleasington Farm, those different strands of his work come together.
Rebecca and Michael were first introduced in 2019 by Peter Saunders. Betsy Boo! began with a story written by Rebecca, which Michael reimagined before they developed the new version together through many rounds of writing, rewriting and conversation.
That same back-and-forth has shaped every story since. Rebecca is always the first to put the story into words — sometimes as a developed draft, sometimes as the outline of a shared idea. Michael then picks it up and begins reshaping its pace and structure, before it passes between them until both feel the story is complete.
The path into each story may change, and there is room for discovery along the way, but the series has a direction — and, somewhere ahead, a destination.
World Design & Artwork
From the beginning, Pleasington Farm was intended to feel like a place with a life of its own — somewhere the characters belonged, and somewhere stories might have been unfolding long before we arrived.
Michael often says that characters should “draw themselves”. Their histories, temperaments and feelings shape not only how they look and move, but the world that gathers around them. In Pleasington Farm, character and place are developed together, each giving the other more meaning.
Living among the hills of North West England, Michael and Rebecca wanted Pleasington Farm to carry something of the landscape around them: rolling hills, old stone walls, winding paths and all the small, familiar marks left by weather, time and use. The result is a world that feels careworn, lived in and loved — shaped as much by memory and feeling as by pencil and paint..
The artwork begins in pencil. Loose sketches establish the character, shape and feeling of a scene. Traditional painting techniques and digital tools are worked together, not to hide the hand-drawn beginning, but to carry it through — preserving the softness, warmth and human touch at the heart of the finished artwork.
Contact us
Whether you would like to talk about the books, the wider world of Pleasington Farm, or simply say hello, we would be very happy to hear from you.
Send us a message using the form and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
