Restaurant and cafe table tops in Holloway

Yes. Holloway is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The communal stair is wide and handsome and the flat door at the top of it is a standard leaf, which is where a long piece stops. 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. Terraces and gardens live outdoors all year. 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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. Bases go in first and tops go in last. 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. 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 long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. 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.

The step or level change between the original room and the return is real, and the units need packing before stone goes across it. 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 circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. A column in the room is designed around, not cut around. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. Loose furniture rather than a landlord fixture.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Kitchens in the upper flats often sit in the return wing at half-landing level, so there are three or four steps inside the flat before the room is reached at all. 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. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Rooflights along a side return mean the worktop is lit from directly above all day, which shows every ripple in a surface and every gap at a scribe. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. Rectangles nest and rounds do not.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Bi-fold or sliding doors at the end of the return mean the run finishes against a frame rather than a wall, and a frame gives nothing to scribe into and no movement to take up. Where a servery run forces a join, the tables never carry one, because a table top is a single piece of stone or it is not a table top. The gangway sets the dimension, not the drawing.