The reason bathroom worktop fitting in Roxeth is quoted per kitchen rather than per metre comes down to the range of rooms these worktops end up in. Older, smaller cottages mixed with interwar terraces, so ceiling heights and window positions vary house to house and there is no standard layout to work from. Kitchens are commonly 2.4m to 3m single runs with a door at each end, and owners keep the units and change surfaces. The tape measure decides it, not the description above, and not anything anybody says over the telephone.
Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. The fittings come from four suppliers and arrive in no particular order, so the surface is drawn last and asked to reconcile all of them. A vanity is where an expensive slab stops being expensive.
Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. Pipework in these houses runs on the surface and gets boxed in, and a top that has to notch round a boxing loses depth in the one direction it cannot spare. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet.
The fabric of the place is Victorian cottage, 1930s terrace and post-war infill flat. That is why the same worktop costs differently two doors apart.
Figures cover the statistical area (MSOA) Roxeth shares with its neighbours| Figure | Roxeth | Against London | What it means for the job |
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| homes built before 1919 | 7% | pre-1919 share lower than 74% of the 723 areas we cover | Corners tend to come in close to square. |
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| households owning their home | 44% | home-ownership share lower than 51% of the 723 areas we cover | |
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| households with no car or van | 34% | no-car share lower than 58% of the 723 areas we cover | |
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Sources: VOA Council Tax Stock of Properties 2025 and ONS Census 2021 for MSOA E02000459. Open Government Licence v3.0.