Restaurant and cafe table tops 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. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. Loading rules are confirmed with the operator beforehand. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The flats are stacked identically, so the kitchen above sits directly over this one and its waste passes through the same boxing. A high street of this kind has flats over the trade, and both of those facts set the shape of the day. Covers decide the count, and the count decides the order. 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. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone.

Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. 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. Pieces come off the van in the order the room fills. 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not.

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. 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. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing. 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. 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. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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 long communal piece is a slab-length question. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

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. 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed. Confirm the permitted loading times and any residents’ hours with the managing agent, and settle the edge profile and the thickness before the slab is cut. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. Dilapidations do not reach what was never fixed down.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. 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. 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. Four finished edges and a set of blind holes, and that is the piece.

A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A piece carried on edge up a flight has to clear the ceiling above the stairs as well as the walls either side of it. 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 trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. 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. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Each piece is checked off against the plan as it lands.