Restaurant and cafe table tops in Primrose Hill

Yes. Primrose Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1, NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. 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 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 bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. 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. Deliveries follow the premises rather than the postcode. 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 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. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. 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 a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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 unload is timed between service, never through it.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. A phased opening is planned as a single order.

A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. 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. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape. 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. 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. What moves out with you is worth choosing well.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. 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 spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away.

Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.