Restaurant and cafe table tops in Old Oak and College Park

Yes. Old Oak and College Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. 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. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. 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. Converted houses mean several sizes, not one. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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 shallow room decides the diameter early.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. 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. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. 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.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. 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 count is agreed before the slab is committed. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. 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. Lead time is the reason the date is set early.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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. What a counter leaves behind is worth designing for. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Written approval before cutting, every time.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Every face polished, because a table is looked down on.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. 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. The largest blank is nested first and the rest around it.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. The stone is straightforward and the base fixing is the job.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Deep original skirting is often left in behind the units, standing them off the wall, so the back edge of the stone is plotted where the carcasses actually sit. 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. A loading bay is the easiest delivery there is.