Stone bar tops in Cheapside

Yes. Cheapside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2V. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The flat entrance door is a certified fire door on a closer, and taking it off for an hour means dealing with the seals and the closer before the day ends. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. Knee room is measured from the frame, not from the nose. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. A notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. Who signs off the steel is settled before it is ordered.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. The seating side decides the piece; the wall side never does.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Original shutter boxes survive in the reveals of the front rooms and stand proud of the plaster, and that is the line a run under the window has to be scribed to. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface.