Restaurant and cafe table tops in Pollards Hill

Yes. Pollards Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16, CR4. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The floor is a concrete slab screeded before the units existed, so it falls slightly and consistently towards the back door. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. Small rooms want small pieces and steady bases. A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. 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. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression.

A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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 are numbered so none of them is carried twice. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear.

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. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. 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. A circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces. 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. Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. 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. Ownership of the pedestals is worth establishing early.

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. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Overhang past the plate is where a table tips.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Windows sit high and the sill line crosses the middle of the run, which limits what can go above the worktop. 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. The seating plan sets the sizes before the slab does.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. The last thing carried in is the first one set out.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. What gets damaged on a route like that is a corner, and a table corner is polished, exposed and at precisely the height of a door frame. A cellar stair is not a route for stone.