Restaurant and cafe table tops in Dartmouth Park

Yes. Dartmouth Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW5. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A long piece has to come through the front door, down the hall, round the newel post and through a doorway with a step down into the addition. 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. What the parade allows is what the room can seat. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. 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. A trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The unload is timed between service, never through it.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. Rectangles nest and rounds do not. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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 column in the room is designed around, not cut around. 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 decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. A brand standard is followed to the letter or not at all.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. The gangway sets the dimension, not the drawing.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The addition wall is half a brick thick in places and has usually had a damp course injected and been re-plastered, which leaves it neither flat nor consistent. 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. Deliveries follow the premises rather than the postcode.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. Nothing is drilled in your dining room.