Restaurant and cafe table tops in Green Street

Yes. Green Street is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E7, E13. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the room has to be ready. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The stair from the street is narrow with a tight turn at the top, which caps piece length well below anything the run itself needs. 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. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades. 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. 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. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full flight. 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. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person. 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. An annexe kitchen is often built to keep a parent independent, so worktop height and reach matter as much as the material does. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. 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. Match it now or hunt for it later.

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. A set is laid out together before anything is wrapped. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. The specification is written so it can be repeated.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The structure below is commercial, so the floor is often timber over a shop ceiling and the load path under an island is worth thinking about. A whole slab still gets reserved, because a dozen matching tops is the entire point of ordering them together. Communal lengths belong in the larger units.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Working hours are constrained by the business underneath, so noisy work has a window rather than a day. Trade in this stock is a single shopfront with a small room behind, so an order is a dozen pieces rather than fifty. A basement is for prep and not for storing stone.