Restaurant and cafe table tops in Haydons Road

Yes. Haydons Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original stair has an open well running the full height of the building, which occasionally lets a long piece go up vertically where it would never take the turns. 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. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. 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. A clock on the kerb changes the order of unloading.

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 splashbacks & upstands and worktop templating. 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. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. 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. 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. Bolted to your own bases, so they leave when you do.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. A second room is easier to match if it is mentioned now.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Winders at the head of each flight are the tightest part of the climb and they are appreciably tighter than the straight run below them. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. Terraces and gardens live outdoors all year.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Ceilings in the principal rooms are three metres or more, so a full-height panel behind a hob is a taller piece here than the same kitchen would need anywhere else. A unit in an old parade rarely has rear access, which means every top and every base comes through the front door in the order it will be set out. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one.