Cafe Ninety7

Head down Blatchington Road towards Hove and you'll find yourself in the kind of café that actually feels like it belongs to the community rather than existing for Instagram. It's the place where locals camp out with laptops, where the espresso machine gets proper respect, and where you're not paying £6 for a flat white because it's fashionable—you're paying it because it's genuinely good. The crowd here skews refreshingly unpretentious: school runs, remote workers, mates catching up over brunch. There's a real sense that Cafe Ninety7 does what it does without overthinking it.