Well enough, if you have a car, and better still with two. About half of working residents drive to work. Nearly a third don't commute at all. Hardly anyone takes the train, even with five stations nearby. Icklesham connects to the world by road and broadband, and the railway barely comes into it.
There are stations within reach: Winchelsea, Three Oaks, Doleham, Rye and Ore. The 2021 Census found only about 2% of working residents took the train to work, and about 1% the bus, from the village's 8 bus stops. Five stations for 2% of commuters is a lot of timetable for very few people.
Most people get to work some other way. About 53% of working residents drive and 31% work from home, which puts the home office ahead of every form of public transport combined. About 7% walk and cycling hardly registers at 1%. Car ownership matches: about 43% of households have two or more cars and only 13% have none. Here the second car is how the household gets through the week, not a luxury.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre about 15 minutes away by car and 22 minutes by public transport.
The same statistics give about 29 minutes by bike and 80 minutes on foot. They are modelled for the area as a whole in 2019, not worked out from any particular front door. An 80-minute walk to the shops means the town centre is effectively out of walking range, and a car is how people get there.
For everyday journeys, the Department for Transport's modelled times put a GP about 14 minutes away by car, 23 by public transport and 78 on foot. A hospital is about 23 minutes by car and 48 by public transport. A food store is about 12 minutes by car or 53 on foot, and a centre of employment is about 25 minutes by car or 53 by public transport. The car and walking times will have held steady, since the destinations haven't moved. The public transport times date from 2019, and services have been cut since, so treat those with more caution. A 53-minute walk for a pint of milk tells you all you need to know about the corner shop.
The bus timetable is more current than those modelled times. Each of Icklesham's 8 stops has about 30 scheduled departures on a weekday and about 2 an hour at peak, and all 8 have some weekend service. That's a real bus service, not a token stop with two buses a day, though you'll still plan around it.
Broadband is better than the lanes suggest. Superfast broadband reaches about 99% of postcodes and none fall below the universal service minimum, but gigabit and ultrafast both reach only about 53%. For home workers, that makes the difference between a good connection and a fast one a question to settle on each house.
Mobile coverage is solid: every postcode gets a 4G or 5G signal from at least one operator, and about 98% from all of them.
For a typical commute, the car does the work: it's a quarter of an hour to town, 25 minutes to a job, and a train that almost nobody in the village uses. The people who make the village work are either on the road early or not commuting at all.
Road noise is the price of the main road. About 95% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band here reaches 70 decibels. Rail noise doesn't register. Those are area measures, and how loud any one house is depends on how close it is to the road and which way it faces.
Icklesham is middling to weak on connectivity: fine by car, workable by bus, strong on broadband basics and poor by train. It suits people whose commute runs along a road or down a broadband line.