Restaurant and cafe table tops in Victoria Park

Yes. Victoria Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the room has to be ready. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The stairs come down against the wall the addition opens off, so the doorway into the kitchen is offset and the corner beside it is taken by the cupboard under the flight. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. The room is handed back laid up, whatever the building. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. Tops travel upright in a frame, faces apart. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Sizes are frozen before machining rather than during it.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. An incoming operator inherits the pedestals, not the choice.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Nothing changes hands until after the template. An under-stairs cupboard eats one end of most of these kitchens, and the run stops at a door that has to keep opening. 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. No wall behind it, so nothing about it is hidden.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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 plan on the van matches the plan on the floor.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. A step in the floor is a base decision.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The addition is a brick narrower than the house it hangs off, which leaves a stub of the original rear wall standing square to the run at the doorway end. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. A goods lift takes a frame and saves a morning.