Worktops in Old Kent Road

Yes. Old Kent Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1, SE15. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. 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. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. The face is uncovered once, and that once is at handover. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Boxed soil stacks and ventilation ducts run behind the units, and the boxing depth changes between floor level and worktop height. Kitchens in these blocks are compact and open to the living space, so the surface is furniture as much as work surface and a quiet consistent stone carries that better than a dramatic one. A kitchen with no window of its own needs tone rather than colour. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. Thirty millimetres bridges a gap that twenty millimetres will not.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. A remnant worth keeping rides back on the van rather than to a skip. 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. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. Stone arrives finished, because a kerb is not a polishing shop.

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. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Specify before the room is finished, not afterwards. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. Adding an island is what moves most of these projects from one slab to two, and that jump is the single largest step in any worktop quotation. Repeat work rewards a single decision taken carefully.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Where the shape is broken, a repeating pattern is worth money. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. A cranked piece eats more slab than the two straights it replaces. Send the kitchen layout with run lengths and the peninsula projection if there is one, and tell us what the lift will take as a single piece. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. A let kitchen is specified for indifference, and rightly so.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. Short lengths are where a full slab starts to pay for itself.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. Long unbroken lengths are what make a plain stone look dear.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. Sintered stone at twelve millimetres weighs roughly half what thirty millimetre granite weighs, so a punishing route can genuinely rule one material in and another out. Thinner stone carries easily and asks for continuous support.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Handover kitchens are fitted with the cheapest carcass the specification allowed, and cam-lock chipboard boxes are what a stone top has to sit on. Light is almost entirely artificial and frequently cool, which pushes warm creams towards grey and makes a genuinely neutral colour the safer choice under bulbs that are already in the ceiling. A galley nests efficiently and frees money for better stone.