Restaurant and cafe table tops in Cann Hall

Yes. Cann Hall is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Waltham Forest. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings in the principal rooms are three metres or more, so a full-height panel behind a hob is a taller piece here than the same kitchen would need anywhere else. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. The programme decides the delivery, not the workshop. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. Sizes are frozen before machining rather than during it.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. The invoice and the approval carry the same name.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. A circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. The unload is timed between service, never through it.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. A villa cut into flats leaves kitchens in rooms that were never kitchens, with services run to wherever they could physically be made to reach. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades.