Restaurant and cafe table tops in Fitzrovia

Yes. Fitzrovia is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W1T, W1W. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A resident bay and a shared-use bay can sit on the same street under different rules, and it is usually the shared one a visitor permit or a ticket touches. 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 whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

A flat over a shop is reached by a separate street door and a straight steep stair, and that stair is the whole access question. Trade in this stock is a single shopfront with a small room behind it, so an order is a dozen pieces rather than fifty, and that changes what is worth doing rather than how it is done. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. 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. Tops travel upright in a frame, faces apart. A shared-use bay allows a paid stay up to a set maximum, and that maximum is routinely shorter than the working day the job needs. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. 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. 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. 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 second room is easier to match if it is mentioned now. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. Offcuts from a counter become the smaller pieces. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. Bring in one base, or send the maker’s plate drawing, and tell us the table count including any spares you want to hold back. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. An incoming operator inherits the pedestals, not the choice.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing changes hands until after the template. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Plaster over blockwork is thin and hollow in patches, so anything fixed back to the wall needs a sound spot found first. 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. Corners eased, since chair backs find them first.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. A dozen pieces is a dozen carries, not one lift.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Camera enforcement gives nobody the chance to explain, where an officer on foot at least sees a tail lift down and stone coming off it. Deliveries are timed to the room rather than to the day, so the unload lands between service or before the doors open. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. A set is laid out together before anything is wrapped.