Worktop fabrication in St Katharine Docks

Yes. St Katharine Docks is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1W. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load plan follows from it. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen is a small square room off a narrow entrance lobby, and the turn out of that lobby is the real limit on piece length. Walls in the system-built blocks are concrete or panel and can bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and we cut the back edge to follow it rather than trimming on site with a grinder. The bench proves it before the van moves. Barrier and dwell-time limits mean the slab comes off the van in one go, so the crew and the route need to be sorted before it arrives.

The estate is privately managed with barrier-controlled vehicle entry, so the van needs booking in and a time-limited pass to reach the block door. Once inside it is a flat, level route across paved quayside, but lifts are small 1970s cars and some blocks route deliveries through a basement service corridor. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. It is settled on the bench, not on site.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Same slab run, or it is not a match. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Nested for the job in front of us.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Radiused, polished, and clear of the joins. The stack boxing needs to be in its final form and the sink and hob on site before we machine, since a boxing that gets re-clad afterwards throws the notch out. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. Sink and hob are dry-fitted on the bench before dispatch, whoever supplied them. Dry-assembled before it leaves.