Restaurant and cafe table tops in Surrey Quays

Yes. Surrey Quays is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. Frames come off before pallets so the floor stays clear. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Infill plots usually put the kitchen at the back with wide doors to a small garden, and that opening is the best route in. 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. A basement is for prep and not for storing stone. An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. 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 rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. 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. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Loading rules are confirmed with the operator beforehand.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. 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 second site is quoted from the same specification. 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. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. Specified for the term, not for a decade by default.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Nothing changes hands until after the template. Underfloor heating in a screed rules out fixing into the floor and rules out standing anything heavy on a single point. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Outdoor covers take a different stone from indoor ones.

Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The kitchen is usually part of the living space, so three edges are read from a sofa rather than from standing height at the sink. 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. Corners eased, since chair backs find them first.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. The count per slab is worked before a figure is given.