Restaurant and cafe table tops in Whitehall Park

Yes. Whitehall Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N19. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. 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. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The flat entrance door and the internal doorways are usually tighter than the communal stairs, which is the opposite of what most people assume. 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. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. A step in the floor is a base decision.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for 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. Nothing is stacked flat on a dining room floor. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. What one room learns, the next room uses.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. 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 circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. Every piece is offered up to its own pedestal. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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. Who pays and who approves are worth naming early.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. 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. Rectangles nest and rounds do not.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Cornice, picture rails and deep skirting survive in converted rooms, so the run stands off the wall and the back edge follows the units rather than the plaster. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. 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. The turn is measured for the frame, not for a person.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. Turnover between operators rarely changes the pedestals.