Reception counters and desks in Liverpool Street

Yes. Liverpool Street is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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 commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Outside opening hours is usually when the kerb is free. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls are solid brick with lime plaster and a hard skim over the top, and that skim comes away in sheets when old tiles are taken back. A block of this age carries a porter's desk in the entrance hall, and that hall is usually a protected interior with panelling, an original floor and finishes nobody is allowed to fix into. Old shopfronts were never sized for a three-metre top. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it.

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. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. Nothing is carried through a reception still taking visitors. 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. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Whoever holds the lease usually holds the loading bay.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. One visit, because a lobby cannot be closed twice. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. One counter, one drawing, and no second bite at it.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The low shelf is drawn to the counter above it, not to the wall. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. A shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot. Measure the lift car internally, photograph the stair turn and the hall, and confirm with the managing agent what may and may not be fixed into. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. A landlord's shell and a tenant's desk are two separate briefs.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The longest counter piece decides the swing radius outside.

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. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Sash windows sit in deep reveals with a working box behind the lining, so a run dying into one has to clear more than the plaster. Blocks of this age carry a porter's desk in the entrance hall, and that hall is usually a protected interior where nothing may be fixed into the original finishes. The service road at the back is often the real way in.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. This is a logistics job before it is a stone job, and the lift car is usually the single biggest constraint on the design. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. Serving height comes off the standard, not off the sketch.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. The way in is walked with the joiner as well as with a tape.