Restaurant and cafe table tops in South Bank

Yes. South Bank is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Estate roads are narrow with parking courts behind the blocks, so the carry crosses open ground rather than a pavement. The commercial space in a new block is a ground-floor unit with a service bay or a loading door behind it, and that is the most straightforward delivery a table order gets: a level threshold, a flat floor and a goods lift where the unit runs over more than one level. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. 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. An awkward corner takes a made shape.

Where a basement car park is the only way up from the parking level the carry starts below ground, and two lifts in one building rarely share the same internal dimensions. 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. Nothing is carried past a chair still in the gangway. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. The unload is timed between service, never through it.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. 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. The programme decides the delivery, not the workshop. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. 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. Sizes are frozen before machining rather than during it.

Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. 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. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. 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. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away. Send the fit-out drawing with final table positions and sizes, the base specification, and the delivery window the managing agent is prepared to accept. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. The invoice and the approval carry the same name.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. The lift car, the loading bay and the building manager decide the piece sizes here, not the slab. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. Priced per piece, with the shape written against each one.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. 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.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Developer carcasses are thin cam-lock chipboard, which is entirely adequate under laminate and wants bracing before stone. A dining room orders tops in sets, so the question is never one piece but twenty that have to read as one colour. Thickness is a look and a lifting weight at the same time.

Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Houses on modern estates are built to a handful of standard plans, so the kitchen is square, predictable and modest in area. The commercial space in a block like this is a ground-floor unit with a service bay behind it, which is the easiest delivery a table order ever gets. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day.