Bathroom worktop fitting in Poplar is not one job repeated, because the kitchens here are not one kind of kitchen. The planned post-war housing has small, well-proportioned separate kitchens of roughly 2m to 2.5m with a serving hatch that people either keep or close up. Newer regeneration flats put the kitchen along the flank of an open living space with a 2.8m run and no island. Once the template is taken the figure stops moving. Everything before that is an estimate and is described as one.
Walls and ceilings carry decades of thick emulsion over artex, and neither surface tells you where the true line is. For a vanity the length is rarely the argument, because it is the depth and what has to be drilled through it that set the piece. Nothing about a vanity is standard except the depth of the unit.
The kitchen is a narrow room off the hall with the window at the far end, so the run is a galley by construction rather than by choice. The service riser is boxed into a corner of the room, and the top is notched round it with a radiused internal corner rather than a square one. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed.
The houses and blocks behind these jobs are 1950s Festival-era planned estate, 1960s-70s concrete tower and 2010s onwards regeneration block. The join count is decided by which of those the room sits in.
Figures cover the 3 statistical areas (MSOAs) around Poplar| Figure | Poplar | Against London | What it means for the job |
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| homes built before 1919 | 6% | pre-1919 share lower than 76% of the 723 areas we cover | Corners tend to come in close to square. |
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| homes built 1919 to 1939 | 3% | inter-war share lower than 84% of the 723 areas we cover | The plans vary house by house. |
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| homes built since 2010 | 36% | post-2010 share higher than 95% of the 723 areas we cover | Recent units sit on a developer module. |
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Sources: VOA Council Tax Stock of Properties 2025 and ONS Census 2021 for MSOAs E02000881, E02000883 and E02000887. Open Government Licence v3.0.
