The Brunswick, Hove

Large bar,restaurant and music venue. A very dark interior with a lot of the wood painted black and a terrace area outside. 4 real ales.

There is a large paved beer garden full of seating to the left of the Brunswick, which is a big building itself. Some of this seating is sheltered and outside the front entrance behind a knee high wall are a couple of café tables which looked like they were more for the use of smokers than anyone else. The right hand side of the pub is a separate room called ‘The Venue’ where live events (mostly music) are held just about every evening of the week. This was closed off during my early Tuesday evening visit, but a crowd was gathering for an event that started later in the evening. The left hand side of the pub is a raised seating area where some people were getting stuck into the pub grub. I don’t blame them as the food looked good and throughout the whole of March during ‘March Madness’ all main dishes are £5, which seems like excellent value. There is more seating in the central bar area where a mixture of standard and premium draught products are available. One of the three hand pumps was unused, but Ringwood’s Fortyniner and Sharp’s Doom Bar were being drawn from the other two. This is more of a music pub than a sports pub so there are no televisions and some background music that wasn’t too loud was playing. The other customers all seemed harmless enough and the barmaid was polite. There is an upstairs room that is advertised as available for private hire. This is a decent enough pub that I would pop into for a quick pint if passing, but being a bit of a philistine the draw of the live music doesn’t interest me so I wouldn’t make a special trip to revisit.