With customers arriving for brunch and leaving at last orders, plus haircuts in the snug and Monopoly at the bar, this pub has been voted by OFM readers as the perfect local’s local

It’s a quiet Tuesday lunchtime at The Crown in Hastings, and the atmosphere – fairly typical, as it turns out – is mellow and bucolic. Sunlight is slanting in through the windows, highlighting the dark walls and floorboards of the U-shaped interior; a local sits at one end of the bar, nursing a pint and reading a paper; a party of trippers make appreciative noises over their recently arrived ham, egg and chips; and landlady Tess Eaton is supervising a shipment of organic vegetables from nearby Fairlight Hall. “I just had a lady say that this was the best pub she’d ever been to,” she grins, as the courgettes are ushered back to the kitchen. “Completely unsolicited, too.”

Actually, The Crown gets that a lot; the winner of OFM’s Best Place to Drink award is the Platonic ideal of the welcoming local. It sits at the end of the much-photographed All Saints’ Street, between the picturesque jumble of Hastings Old Town and the beachfront, and attracts a winningly diverse crowd, from dyed-in-the-wool locals – fishermen, foragers – to the more recent arrivistes deemed “DFLs” (Down From London) to curious gourmets and casual drinkers. They all sense that Eaton and her partner Andrew Swan have gone the extra mile in everything from their handmade tables (courtesy of Hastings & Bexhill Wood Recycling) to their painstakingly seasonal menu (duo of mackerel or tempura courgette flowers, rather than cod and chips or vegetable lasagne) and local-pump selection of ales and ciders (from the likes of the Romney Marsh Brewery and Kentish Pip Cider). The art on the walls is covetable stuff by local artists; fresh-cut flowers, from Eaton’s mother’s garden, decorate the tables. Even the soap in the toilets is scrupulously sourced, from the Hastings Soap Co.

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“It wasn’t like we had an overarching vision for the place,” says Swan, who oversees the kitchen. “But Hastings is a creative town and, being independent, we could act as a showcase for all these local producers.”

“And we’re a real all-day operation,” says Eaton. “We open at 11am, so we’re a coffee shop in the morning, a cafe in the daytime …”

“… And we serve food eight and a half hours a day,” continues Swan. “So we’re a pub in the afternoon, a restaurant in the evening, a bar as it gets later …”

“We also do haircutting in the snug, 20 quid for a cut and a pint,” says Eaton. “We had a gardening club, we’ve had wreath-making, craft workshops, cider festivals …”

“We never wanted to limit ourselves,” says Swan. “And we wanted everyone to come through the door. It’s a public house, after all.”

There’s been a pub on the site since 1758, but The Crown had been boarded up for two years when Eaton and Swan, refugees from marketing and structural engineering respectively, stumbled across it while touring the UK in their camper van. Their enthusiasm for hospitality had been fired up by a stint at The Reliance, the dining room/pub in Leeds: “The feel, the spread of customers, the fact they sold whatever they wanted,” says Eaton. “It was their life, and that really inspired us.”

“We felt we could replicate that in Hastings,” says Swan. “We were really excited by the fishing fleet here, and that we’d be able to base our menu around that. We quickly realised there’s a lot of people power and social networks we could tap into.”

From their “secret” opening in July 2014, which attracted 200 people, a mariachi band and the obligatory contingent of piratically costumed locals, Eaton and Swan have assiduously created their own local hub. At a time when pubs in the UK are shuttering at a rate of around 25 a week, their attention to detail and infectious enthusiasm has helped them buck the trend.

“It’s about creating a whole vibe,” says Eaton, “from having local hazelnuts in the bakewell tart to the front-of-house staff knowing what a lot of regulars drink before they walk through the door. We want people to treat this place like their living room. We had one couple who came for brunch at 11am, and stayed till 11pm; they took all their meals at different tables, they had a nap in the snug, they read the papers, they played Monopoly …”

“And then they missed their train home and had to find a B&B,” says Swan. “They got a couple of bottles of beer as a prize for being our most dedicated customers.”

With The Crown in the ascendant, their title could soon be in jeopardy. thecrownhastings.co.uk