The Laughing Fish, Uckfield

The Laughing Fish is a village local located adjacent to Isfield Railway Station which is on the heritage Lavender Line. There’s a relatively small split-level beer garden before the car park at the rear. Some picnic tables are found on the path out front where steps lead up to a front porch that is full of books. Mostly paperbacks, I guess the village has a book swap system. Inside the floor is bare boarded throughout with a tiled seating area in the front left bay window. Seating continues up the left to the rear, this side of the pub feels like a dining area. The left side of the bar counter supports three hand pumps, two of which were in operation drawing Three Acre Brewery’s Best and Long Man Brewery’s Best. A limited selection of premium and craft keg were also available alongside Fosters. I went for the Long Man which was OK. The main bar area is found in the front right where the serving counter is lined with five more hand pumps. Unfortunately three were unused with no further cask options. This pub’s rural location next to the station, and with a campsite at the rear, means that food is a big draw. The mains are priced around £16 and the lunchtime sandwiches £8.50. To the rear of the bar area, on the way to the toilets, is a jukebox that may have been supplying the very low background music, and a bar billiards table. I was going to have a game with kids, but knocked it on the head when I noted that it’s £2 a game. This pub is in a nice location and the welcome was friendly, but I wouldn’t class this as a destination pub which it would need to be for me to consider driving out to it again.

The former Station Hotel, still performing some of that function as Isfield is currently the southern terminus of the partly restored Lavender Line heritage railway. Anyway, it has been opened out to some extent, to leave an interconnected U-shaped layout of the main bar to the right (with snug-sized seating area beyond) and the larger dining room on the left-hand side. Although a Greene King house these days, the cask ale selection from a total of nine handpumps split between the two counters was Long Man best bitter and an immaculate Session Pale from Three Acre Brewery (£5.25).