Reception counters and desks in Camden Town

Yes. Camden Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Trolleys cross block paving badly, so boards go down first. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A top-floor conversion puts part of the kitchen under the slope of the roof, so the wall behind the run stops at head height along one side of the room. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. A parade unit is entered up a step nobody thought to measure. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does.

Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. One space, one visit, and the counter goes in whole.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Two desks on one site still take two templates. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. Matching across sites means matching blocks, not matching names.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Where the front curves, the shelf below it curves with it. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. What is left behind at lease end is a specification question.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. The drawing follows the carcass; the carcass does not follow the drawing.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. The return between the two levels is drawn first and cut first.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. The flat below hears the floor more than the walls, so lifting boards to move a waste run is a conversation with a neighbour before it is a morning of work. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Where the hall is tall, the light finds every seam in the counter.