Restaurant and cafe table tops in World's End

Yes. World's End is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. Pieces are staged inside before the van is moved off. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

These are built in dense concrete, so support for a peninsula or an end panel goes in with proper anchors rather than plugs. 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. Pavement covers take their own specification. Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. 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 pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. 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. Larger diameters go in early, while the floor is still clear. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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 pavement stays walkable while the frames come off.

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 splashbacks & upstands. 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. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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 batch reference goes on file with the drawing. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. 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 column in the room is designed around, not cut around. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. A short term does not justify a surface that fails early.

The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. 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. A lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The original units were screwed to timber grounds set into the wall, and where those were torn out the plaster was patched rather than replaced. 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. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. A downstand over a run caps wall unit height before it caps anything else, and the splashback then takes its height from the steel rather than from the units. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Where the kitchen is on the entrance level, the piece comes off the deck and turns straight in without going up or down at all. The trade in this stock is a row of units under a block, usually a roller shutter with a shallow room behind it. What the parade allows is what the room can seat.