The Crown & Anchor, Eastbourne

Official site of The Crown & Anchor - crownandanchoreastbourne.co.uk

Official site of The Crown & Anchor - crownandanchoreastbourne.co.uk

Busy town centre pub with an almost wrap-around polygonal corner layout. All fairly anonymous inside, but with low lighting and a live band playing, I suppose anybody was giving much thought to that! Anyway, as a Greene King house, it was a slight surprise to find Harvey's (£4.50) and 6X available from two of the four handpumps, along with Old Speckled Hen and a reversed IPA clip.

Sounds like this pub has been smartened up with a bit of a refurbishment since previous reviews and now has a focus on food as well as wet sales. Internally it’s a modern decor with mainly plain tiled and wooden floors, pastel coloured walls with some typical exposed brick walls in places, one of which has a large chalk board with the food menu. The main bar room has wooden table and chairs throughout but still plenty of bar stools around the square bar area. To the right is still a more public area with pool table and dart boards but still quite smart with plenty of comfortable seating and then upstairs is a function room and access to the very good outside balcony area with limited seating providing wonderful views of the sea. The food is decent pub grub rather than gastro with the usual Beer battered fish and chips and assorted burgers coming in around £10 and we found it a decent stop for a spot of lunch. Walked past it every night in the evening when it was significantly livelier with a younger crowd (presumably due to its prominent position near the sea front and the closest decent pub to the pier) and there are regular live music acts at the weekend who I presume play in the function room upstairs. The only downside is that this is a Greedy King pub and of the four real ale hand pumps three had Old Speckled Hen, Greene King IPA and Hardys & Hansons Olde Trip and the fourth was unclipped, although according to the barman the fourth one usually had a changing guest ale but I was just unlucky for my visit. Good pub and deservedly popular , but due to the ale choice I ducked it in the evenings for the Belgium Cafe further along the seafront.

Spitfire, 6X, & Bass. Bass was ropey, Spitfire ran out but was fine when changed. Modern looking bar on one side, sofas & dartboard sit a little oddly together, blackboard dangerously close to dartboard for someone scoring a player as bad as me. Somewhat lacking in character.