Kitchen Fitters in Newcastle-under-Lyme

Newcastle is an older town than the Potteries around it, and it shows in the housing. Rather than street after street of the same pottery workers’ terrace, the borough runs from Georgian and Victorian property near the town centre, through the interwar suburbs at Westlands, Poolfields, Clayton and May Bank, out to the former mining villages at Silverdale, Knutton and Chesterton.

That variety changes the job more than the postcode does. A 1930s semi in Westlands has a squarish kitchen of reasonable size, a walk-in pantry that is usually the first thing to go, and a solid floor that is rarely as level as it looks. There is normally room for a proper run of units down two walls, and often a case for a slim island once the pantry wall comes out.

The ex-local-authority housing at Chesterton, Knutton and Cross Heath is a different proposition. Solidly built, often with generous room sizes, but kitchens that have had one budget replacement in forty years and need taking back to brick rather than upgrading. Those jobs almost always turn up wiring and pipework that want sorting while the units are out.

Closer to the town centre and up around Thistleberry the stock gets older again, with narrower rooms and the same constraints we see in the Stoke terraces — and some of it sits within a conservation area, which affects windows and external work rather than the kitchen itself.

The other thing worth knowing about Newcastle is that a large slice of the housing round Silverdale, Thistleberry and the town centre is rented, much of it to Keele students. Landlord kitchens are a genuinely different brief: they want to survive six tenancies rather than look their best in photographs, and they need fitting in the few weeks between one group leaving and the next arriving.

We work to those windows deliberately — hard-wearing worktops, doors that can be replaced individually rather than as a set, and appliances chosen for parts availability rather than looks.

Several of our trades are Newcastle people, which matters more than it sounds on a kitchen fit. A worktop template, a late change of unit, a door that needs easing — all of it is a short hop rather than a scheduling problem.

We cover Newcastle town centre, Westlands, Poolfields, Clayton, May Bank, Wolstanton, Porthill, Bradwell, Thistleberry, Seabridge, Basford, Cross Heath, Knutton, Silverdale, Chesterton and out towards Keele, Madeley and Audley.

It is the most common question we get in the interwar semis, and the honest answer has two halves.

Taking out the wall between kitchen and dining room needs a structural opening — a steel beam, calculations from a structural engineer, and building regulations approval from Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council. We do not do structural work, and we would rather tell you that on a web page than on a doorstep.

What we do is everything after it. Once the opening is formed and signed off, we fit the kitchen into the new space, run the flooring through both halves so it reads as one room, move the electrics and radiators to suit the new layout, and make good the reveals.

Plenty of our Newcastle kitchens are exactly that job, sequenced with a builder who forms the opening first.