Restaurant and cafe table tops in Forest Gate

Yes. Forest Gate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E7. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many of these had a bathroom or a WC built onto the far end of the addition, so the room now ends at a stud wall rather than at the original brickwork. 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. 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. 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.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Each piece is checked off against the plan as it lands. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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 particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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.

Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. 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. Cut from the same run as the counter, so the room agrees. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. 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. The underside matters, because a hand goes under every edge.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. The only window is in the side wall facing into the side return, so the room reads darker than its size and the worktop is doing much of the reflecting. 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.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing.