From History to Hollybridge: How Bean Before Retells the Past

Alongside the everyday adventures of Bean Tales and the time-hopping journeys of Bean & Gone, there's a third series in The Beans world: Bean Before.

Bean Before takes a different approach. Rather than following the everyday cast of Hollybridge, each book is a standalone story — one that steps back from the village and reaches into real history, retelling a moment from our past with a distinctly Beans twist.

The idea grew out of a simple observation: history isn't as fixed as it sometimes seems. New discoveries regularly challenge what we thought we knew about the past, and at any single point in time, somewhere in the world, a real story was unfolding — one that shaped the world we live in now, whether we remember it or not.

Bean Before takes those moments and retells them through the same imaginative, gentle lens as the rest of the Beans world — approachable for young readers, but rooted in something that actually happened. Each book stands on its own, but still weaves subtly into the wider Beans story, for readers who want to spot the connections.

We think this makes Bean Before a nice fit for bedtime as much as it does for the classroom — a way into real history, told the way a six-year-old wants to hear it: as an adventure.

One Bean Before title is out already, with more on the way. [Explore the full series →]