Restaurant and cafe table tops in Greenwich Peninsula

Yes. Greenwich Peninsula is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE10. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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 shared forecourt is booked rather than chanced. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Poured screed over steel decking can fall away across a long run, so level is checked across the whole room before anything is packed. These units are large and open, which is where the long communal table shows up, and a piece longer than a slab is a decision rather than a detail: either two tops meeting over a central leg, or a single piece in a material that comes in a longer sheet. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. 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. A shallow room decides the diameter early.

Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. 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. A dozen pieces is a dozen carries, not one lift. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Where the van cannot wait, the room has to be ready.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating 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. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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. Fit-out dates are worked backwards from the opening. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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. The bases usually stay and only the pieces change.

A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. Give us the communal table length and the base positions along it, and confirm the goods lift dimensions so the frames can be sized to the car. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. A managed building wants notice and it gets notice.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The original openings were sized for goods, but the residential doors dropped into them were not. 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. Made to the plate you own, so nothing else has to be replaced.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Painted brick is flat nowhere, and raked-back mortar joints leave a line no straightedge agrees with. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. 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. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Bases go in first and tops go in last.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Ceilings are high and there are usually no wall units, so a splashback runs to whatever height is decided rather than to a cupboard. The delivery is straightforward by comparison, since a goods lift and a loading door will take a full frame and a whole floor can be staged in one movement. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day.