Restaurant and cafe table tops in Coney Hall

Yes. Coney Hall is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. A clock on the kerb changes the order of unloading. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Meters were moved out to a box on the flank wall on a later programme, and the cupboard they came out of is usually still standing in the corner. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. Bases go in first and tops go in last. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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. Counted off at the tail lift where the standing is short.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating 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 worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. A step in the floor is a base decision. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. 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. 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. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. The kitchen doorway is usually offset into a corner, so one leg of an L is short before anyone has designed anything. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. What gets damaged on a route like that is a corner, and a table corner is polished, exposed and at precisely the height of a door frame. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person.