Kitchen worktops in Strand

Yes. Barely any family housing - the stone work here is tea points, staff kitchens and small serviced apartment kitchenettes in office and hotel buildings. Standard job is a 2m to 3m counter with an undermount bowl, a boiling tap cut-out and a matching upstand, repeated across several floors. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The load plan follows from it.

Victorian commercial block, Edwardian chambers and hotel and office building. Wider halls make the carry noticeably easier, and that alone can remove a join that a narrower terrace would have forced into the run. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

Red route with no stopping along the Strand itself and constant event and works closures around Aldwych and Trafalgar Square. Access is via a basement loading bay with a height restriction, a booked goods lift, and building security requiring method statements in advance. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw.

Worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop templating, in that order. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Sealed before we leave. Repeat tea points across floors look identical on the drawing but never are - template each floor separately, the risers and boxings move.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Every join sits over a gable. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. It is the slow part of the day and it should be. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. One visit, our own installers. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.