We survey every kitchen before we price it, and the vanity tops we take on in Bromley Town Centre show why that is not just paperwork. Two different jobs sit side by side here. The new blocks around Bromley South and Ringers Road have small L-shaped or galley kitchens open to the living space, usually 2.4-3.2m of run with a developer-spec laminate that owners swap out early. The Victorian terraces off the main roads are mostly side-return extensions with a single long run against the flank wall and a peninsula rather than a full island. Neither case is harder than the other for us. Both start with somebody standing in the kitchen with a tape.
The side return was an outside toilet and a coal store before it was ever a kitchen, and the walls left over from that are half a brick thick. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. The depth sets the piece, not the length of the wall.
The back addition is a narrow two-storey outrigger with a single external wall, and the kitchen galley runs the length of it. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. A rear addition bathroom is cold, narrow and full of pipework.
What we are cutting for, here, is Victorian terrace, 1930s semi, 2010s apartment block and office-to-residential conversion. The wall build-up is different in each, and the scribe follows the wall.
Figures cover postcode districts BR1 and BR2| Figure | Bromley Town Centre | Against London |
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| homes built before 1919 | 17% | pre-1919 share lower than 56% of the 723 areas we cover |
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| flats and maisonettes | 33% | flat share lower than 74% of the 723 areas we cover |
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| households with no car or van | 20% | no-car share lower than 88% of the 723 areas we cover |
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Sources: VOA Council Tax Stock of Properties 2025 and ONS Census 2021 for 15 MSOAs (E02000134, E02000144 and 13 more). Open Government Licence v3.0.