Restaurant and cafe table tops 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. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Empty frames go back on the van the same trip. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The handrail is fixed to the wall side of the flight, so the clear width at hand height is a hundred millimetres less than the stair measures at the tread. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block: a roller shutter, a shallow room behind it and a paved forecourt in front with bollards across the approach. Communal lengths belong in the larger units. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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. A trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A suspension costs less than a lost fit-out morning.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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. A set is laid out together before anything is wrapped. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. A shallow room decides the diameter early. Tell us how close a van can get to the door, and whether the tables have to be moved regularly, since that decides the thickness before anything else does. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 operator chooses and the freeholder rarely has to.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The kitchen door is a fire door onto a lobby that is also the escape route, so nothing can be stood in that lobby while the work goes on. That forecourt is the carry, and it is longer than it looks, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley in a frame rather than being walked in by hand. A basement is for prep and not for storing stone.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. 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. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. Each piece is checked off against the plan as it lands.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The first kitchen was fitted by the authority to a standard layout, so the waste, the gas point and the sockets are all still where that layout put them. Bollards and a paved forecourt keep a van further from the door than a map suggests, so the pieces travel the last stretch on a trolley. Roller shutters and bollards lengthen the carry.