Restaurant and cafe table tops in Elephant and Castle

Yes. Elephant and Castle is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1, SE17. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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 suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A serving hatch through to the living room was common in these plans, and blocking one up leaves a panel of newer plaster part way along the run. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. Pavement covers take their own specification. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. 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. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. A second room is easier to match if it is mentioned now.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone. 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. A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. 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. Loose furniture rather than a landlord fixture.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where the kitchen has been opened into the living room the opening was trimmed with a steel, and a stub of the old wall was left standing at one end. 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. Made to the plate you own, so nothing else has to be replaced.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. 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. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom flat. 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. Every face polished, because a table is looked down on.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A goods lift booked by the hour puts a clock on the whole delivery, so pieces go up in a planned order and nothing is handled twice. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing.