Kitchen worktops in Spitalfields

Yes. In the Georgian houses the kitchen is usually in the basement or rear ground floor, fitted between panelled walls with a run of 2.4m to 3m and no space for an island. Owners often want a low-profile, quiet installation that does not fight the period joinery, so slim edge profiles and undermounted sinks are the norm. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. It sits in the fitting line as time on site rather than as anything to do with the stone. It is one line among the others, and it is honest.

early Georgian silk weavers' house, Victorian warehouse conversion and 1970s-80s infill flat. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The kitchen is usually a long galley in a rear extension or side return, so the run lengths are the first thing we check against slab length, anything beyond roughly three metres either needs a join or a second slab, and that decision alone moves the material figure more than a few extra square metres would. Priced from the building, not from a rate card.

Most of the area is a conservation area with a high concentration of listed houses, so any fixings into original fabric and any external hoisting need consent and a careful method. Streets are narrow, largely pedestrianised near the market and loading windows are early morning only, with staircases inside the houses that are steep, winding and original. A hoisted piece needs a clear drop zone, a lifting plan and someone stationed at street level, none of which gets arranged on the morning. That is why the fitting line on a quote reflects manpower and time rather than square metres. It appears as its own line rather than buried in a rate.

Worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation, in that order. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Proven on the bench before dispatch. You cannot cut a listed house to suit the stone, so the stone gets templated and jointed to suit the house, including a joint mid-run just to get it down the stairs.

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. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. One datum for the whole room. 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. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. Plotted, not estimated. 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. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Dry-assembled before it leaves. 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.