Kitchen worktops in Greenwich

Yes. Most of the town-centre stock is narrow three-storey Georgian and early Victorian terraces where the kitchen sits in the back addition or on the lower ground floor, so runs are short, 2.4m to 3m, and rarely straight. Where the side return has been opened the kitchen becomes an L with a small peninsula rather than a true island. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end.

Georgian terrace, early Victorian terrace, Edwardian mansion flat and 1980s riverside infill. The bathroom upstairs sits directly over the kitchen, so its waste comes down in a boxed corner from floor to ceiling that no worktop is going to move. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. Older houses come off the bench with longer scribes.

The one-way system, the pedestrianised streets around the market and resident-permit-only bays mean a slab usually has to be walked in from wherever the van can legally stop, through a narrow Georgian front door and often down a tight winder stair to a lower-ground kitchen. Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. Disconnection happens before the old top is lifted, not during.

Worktop replacement and worktop fabrication, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The annexe top goes in on the same day. Nothing here is square, template off the fitted units rather than the walls, and check the stair turn will take a 3m piece before quoting it as one.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Yield is worked on the slab, not on a calculator. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A postformed top swallowed the fall. This will not. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

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 replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. A leaseholder still needs the building to consent. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. The strip-out is planned around it.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The alcove was never square and it still is not.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. The return is nested first, because it fits worst.