Restaurant and cafe table tops in Victoria

Yes. Victoria is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1E, SW1P. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The kitchen was a service room at the back of the flat, so it is a long way from the front door along a corridor with two turns in it. A high street of this kind has flats over the trade, and both of those facts set the shape of the day. A high ceiling wants a thicker edge under it. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. 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 cellar stair is not a route for stone. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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 bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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. The largest blank is nested first and the rest around it. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put. Confirm the permitted loading times and any residents’ hours with the managing agent, and settle the edge profile and the thickness before the slab is cut. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. An incoming operator inherits the pedestals, not the choice.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Freeholder consent, a works agreement and proof of insurance are often wanted before a van is allowed to unload. 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. Nothing is drilled in your dining room.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Walls are solid brick with lime plaster and a hard skim over the top, and that skim comes away in sheets when old tiles are taken back. Loading is restricted, often to a short window in the morning, so the order arrives complete and gets counted inside rather than on the pavement. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. 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. A poseur height changes the base and not the blank.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. Where a servery run forces a join, the tables never carry one, because a table top is a single piece of stone or it is not a table top. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper.