Restaurant and cafe table tops in New Cross Gate

Yes. New Cross Gate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. An unload that overruns costs a service, so it does not. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Where the kitchen is on the entrance level, the piece comes off the deck and turns straight in without going up or down at all. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. The room is handed back laid up, whatever the building. 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. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it.

Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. 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. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week.

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 fabrication 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. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. A second site is quoted from the same specification. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. 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. Nothing is cut until the seating plan stops moving. 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. 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 rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. 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. A brand standard is followed to the letter or not at all.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. The measurement that governs everything here is the gangway, because it caps the diameter before anybody has chosen a colour. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table.