Kitchen worktops in Soho

Yes. Small flats above bars, restaurants and shops with kitchens under 2.5m of run, often in a room with a sloping ceiling on the top floor. Compact appliances, slimline dishwashers, and worktop depths cut down to 550mm to keep a walkway are routine. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap.

18th-century walk-up house, flat above restaurant and warehouse-style conversion. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. What is under the old top is the real question.

The hardest access in the borough. No parking at all, pedestrianised sections, servicing windows that clash with restaurant deliveries, and 18th-century houses with 700mm doors and steep dogleg stairs with winders and no landing. Night-time economy means the working window is genuinely 8am to lunchtime. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order. Winder stairs in these old houses mean the maximum piece that will physically turn is often around 1.8m - design the joints for the staircase first and the kitchen second.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The units stay, the surface changes. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.