The Ounce & Ivy Bush (JD Wetherspoon), East Grinstead

Official site of The Ounce & Ivy Bush (JD Wetherspoon) - www.jdwetherspoon.com

Official site of The Ounce & Ivy Bush (JD Wetherspoon) - www.jdwetherspoon.com

This is a modern Wetherspoons located inside an ugly steel and glass building just off the main drag through the centre of town. The main entrance was closed when I visited, presumably for Covid-related reasons, with customers left to try and figure out that a second entrance can be found a short way down Little King Street, betrayed only by the presence of a couple of smokers. Inside, you find yourself in a large, mainly open-plan room reminiscent of a typical ‘90’s drinking barn, carpeted for the most part and with a few pillars and other such bits of partitioning offering scant privacy mainly in the areas around the perimeter of the room. The side entrance takes you directly into a very large seating area with the servery a distant sight at the far end of the room. Plenty of mixed seating options are available across this space, with some nice banquette booths over to the left under a set of bookcases, three rows of regular tables and chairs through the centre with high tables and stools opposite the bar and a bare boarded raised area over to the right with a few more standard tables and chairs under some pretty grim looking paintings. The bar runs along the mid-part of the back wall and has a cheap looking counter with back-lit frontage and an almost completely plain white wall bar back. There is a bit of tongue and groove panelling along part of the rear wall, whilst the rest of the room has been painted in uninspiring neutral shades. Several TV screens were showing subtitled rolling news channels and there was a very small number of punters in – by far the fewest I’ve seen in any post-lockdown ‘Spoons. Perhaps as a result of this, the pub was also short-handed behind the bar, leading to a long wait for the hard-working lone server to get around to taking my order and another long wait for it to then be brought over to my table. The ale range also looked like it was being managed in accordance with low turnout, with just two ‘Spoons regulars and one guest ale on the two banks of handpulls. Thankfully the guest ale was a well-kept Oakham JHB which I enjoyed very much once it finally arrived. I found this a pretty drab and uninteresting ‘Spoons with very little to recommend about it. The staff were friendly enough but clearly overworked and the sloe guest ale was very nice, but this fell short on pretty much every other front and highlighted the shortcomings of this chain under the new Covid regulations – perhaps I would have had a very different impression had I visited prior to the pandemic, but the plain, open-plan interior, dull décor and lifeless chain bar atmosphere suggest I probably wouldn’t have.