Established in 1985, the school has gone from strength to strength and is now a leading local institution, with many pupils going on to continue their studies at the Royal Ballet and the English National Ballet. This year we were treated to a production of Sleeping Beauty, a wonderful show which involved jazz, ballet and tap performers from pre-primary right up to senior school.

Performances ran for a week at the Bacon Theatre in Cheltenham and parents, teachers and friends mucked in throughout rehearsals and behind the scenes to ensure that things ran smoothly. Worktop Express donated vehicles and 2Man personnel for transportation of set and props, plus a few keen members of staff to help backstage.

In the end, Sleeping Beauty played to great audiences and raised £3,000 for charity: congratulations to everyone involved!

The Worktop Express in-house delivery service puts the customer first. We cut out the middleman and the chance of transit damage by loading your goods direct from our warehouse to our vehicles. With our 2Man operation, a three hour delivery timeslot is confirmed the day before delivery and a courtesy call 30 minutes prior to arrival. At point of delivery, the two person team will transport the goods to the nearest ground floor access point of your property, sparing you the inconvenience of offloading and providing ample opportunity for you to inspect the quality of your purchase.

Best of all, we don’t charge anything extra for this service! It couldn’t be simpler to choose the 2Man option – simply select 2Man delivery and required weekday during online checkout (or discuss with our sales staff if ordering via telephone). For more information on delivery services to your postcode, please visit the delivery details page.

Worktop Express worktops have featured in several magazines in the past and we are looking forward to some new articles coming out this year. Please check out our babies in the September issue of House Beautiful: our full stave oak worktops work wonderfully well against green cabinets and as a large island breakfast bar in this stunning U-shaped kitchen.

Our American walnut worktops will also be photographed in April as part of a setpiece to be featured in Ideal Home November; we can’t wait to see the results! Watch this space for pictures and more updates…

Not so for Worktop Express. Our own office move had been keenly anticipated and planned since 2011 so that when the 18th February arrived we were ready to go! The installation of equipment and staff at our new premises ran with all the smoothness of a military operation…

Well, almost! As they say, the best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry… and so admittedly there were a few minor disruptions over the weekend (but nothing we couldn’t cope with!). Most importantly, when trading opened on Monday 20th, we were unpacked, offices sparkling and iroko desks (constructed from our own iroko worktops of course!) cleaned. The smell of Danish oil wafted down the corridor and excitement was in the air – in short, we were bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to work.

One exciting bonus of our relocation is the newly constructed showroom space. It has long been in our plans to kit out a full showroom with Worktop Express products, to create a space for our customers to visit, gain inspiration and get a real feel for what is on offer.

Watch this space…

We don’t have any images of the completed building yet, hence the schematic pictures that are displayed on this page – but we are here, so please do get in touch!

Our new address is as follows:

Worktop Express
c/o DOS Ltd
Units 6-8 Brearley Court
Baird Road
Waterwells Business Park
Quedgeley
GL2 2AF

We began 2011 with a vow to provide our customers with the best service at every level. Huge strides were taken to improve our delivery service (more on that later!) and midway through the year we partnered with the independent review website TrustPilot, aiming to really gain insight into customer satisfaction. In only a few months we accumulated close to 1,000 positive customer reviews relating to our products and service – thank you to everyone who wrote in! We are more determined than ever to maintain and indeed exceed this standard of service in 2012.

One wonderful example of a customer well-satisfied was the case of Bea’s of Bloomsbury; after fitting out their Bloomsbury branch with our wenge worktops, the luxury tea shop received critical acclaim for their interior design – winning the New Store Europe Retail Week Interiors Award for Best Small Shop.

2011 was also a year of exciting expansion. Over 20,000 orders were completed over twelve months: a 50% increase on 2010! Furthermore, in demonstration of our commitment to service, we worked on broadening the range of options available to our customers. This was realised both in terms of product choice and delivery.

We expanded our product selection to include Deluxe Walnut, End Grain Butcher Blocks, and various Full Stave worktops in timbers including zebrano, wenge and maple. This expansion has strengthened our position as the UK’s leading online solid wood worktop specialist (with over 20 different stocked ranges).

Our appreciation and love of solid wood has continued to grow; indeed, 2011 allowed us to realise the possibilities offered by this wonderful natural material by extending our specialist knowledge beyond worktops to other products. As such, the successful launch of our solid wood kitchen cabinet range was a real highlight of 2011 – we now stock a comprehensive selection of cabinets, drawers and doors (doors also supplied in a variety of finishes such as sanded, lacquered or hand painted). We also augmented our bespoke service, giving the Worktop Express fabrication team the chance to really show what they can do. This action paved the way for our fabrication sale in January 2012 which has been a terrific success!

Worktop Express continued to prioritise customer service with an enhancement of delivery options. Indeed, the implementation of our own in-house 2Man delivery service was perhaps the biggest and proudest step Worktop Express took in 2011: beginning with just one van in January 2011, we worked hard to eliminate any kinks by trialling the service thoroughly before expanding to southern and central England in March. The huge success of this trial period allowed us to expand rapidly, covering the whole of the UK by summer – making us the only solid wood worktop specialists in the country to offer an in-house, next-day, two-man delivery service nationwide! Our subsequent partnership with an external two-man courier also proved valuable, adding real flexibility to our burgeoning service. As a result of these changes we ended the year with a fantastic first-delivery success rate of 99%.

So what next for Worktop Express? Where to start! Plans are afoot to expand our in-house 2Man delivery service even further, we’re hard at work designing our showroom which is set to open in spring… and much more!

Goodbye for now: we hope you enjoyed 2011 as much as we did and look forward to helping you in 2012.

The enduring popularity of oak has much to do with its innate beauty and resilience. Attractive in all forms, the delicate grain pattern is accentuated to its fullest with our prime oak range which uses staves specifically chosen for colour consistency and purity. Now, for the first time, these grade A cuts of wood can be appreciated to an even higher degree through a full stave construction: a formation that highlights the timber’s flawless appearance by using extra-wide, 90mm staves which – as the name suggests – run the full length of the worktop. The finished product is a stunning testament to the matchless quality and unique charm of a carefully crafted, well-sourced natural material.

Worktop Express is proud to offer the most comprehensive range of worktops in the UK. We are the only company to manufacture full stave worktops in such a variety of species. Furthermore, our entire range is held in stock at various depots through the UK, ensuring a fast and easy nationwide delivery.

If you have any questions relating to any of our products, we would be delighted to help. You can get in touch by telephone on 0845 22 22 644 or send us an email here.

Christmas may be over, but Worktop Express have one last present we’ve been saving for our customers! The ringing in of the new year is a perfect opportunity to freshen up your kitchen: so what better time could there be for a huge sale?

To that end, we are delighted to offer a 50% discount on all fabrication services (including pre-oiling) – with no compromise on the superior quality delivered by our experienced fabrication team. Using only cutting-edge techniques and machinery, our bespoke service will ensure that all worktops are cut and finished to your exact requirements. The service is quick and easy from start to finish: standard lead time for delivery to UK mainland is just 5-10 working days from customer confirmation of diagram to receipt of the order (please note that delivery to Cornwall, West Wales and Scotland can take 5-15 working days).

We are also offering a price match: if it happens that a cheaper price for the same works is offered elsewhere, please contact us and we will match any like-for-like quotation.

Orders must be placed by the 31st January 2012 at the latest in order to obtain sale prices – so please do not hesitate to take advantage of this unbeatable offer! We look forward to helping you.

As the festive period nears its peak, our thoughts turn to our Worktop Express customers. Some might say that the kitchen is the key to a good Christmas: the place where those all-important mince pies are baked, mulled wine is mulled, and turkeys are roasted.

That’s why we’re delivering right up until the 21st December. We’re also open to take orders on the 22nd December from 9am-2pm, and between Xmas and New Year (28th-30th) from 10am-2pm. Our earliest delivery date for 2012 will be 4th January.

In the case of our fabrication department, the last date to place an order for delivery before Christmas is Friday, 9th December. Diagrams for all orders that require delivery before Christmas need to be confirmed by 5pm on Monday 12th (at the latest). Our last delivery date for 2011 is Wednesday 21st December 2011. All orders for bespoke worktops placed after 9th December will be scheduled for delivery in 2012 (earliest possible date 4th January).

We could now make a joke about how if you are a very good girl/boy, Santa might just drop a delightful worktop under your tree… but we won’t. Ho ho ho!

All of us here at Worktop Express wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

“I’ve been doing this job a long time and I’m really struggling to remember a more difficult year in which people have had to do business…Which brings us to the reason for these awards. This evening is more than ever about recognising the sterling efforts of retailers designers, shopfitters – those who make retail vision reality”

To win is no mean feat. We are therefore delighted to announce the success of recent customer Bea’s of Bloomsbury in the ‘Best Small Shop’ category!

As you may remember from a previous blog, earlier in the year Worktop Express supplied 30m of wenge worktop to Bea’s for their new shop in One New Change. Located in the heart of the City of London, a stunning variety of wenge timber was required to kit out the luxury tea shop. Our worktops were used for the entire dining and servery area (including a large bespoke worktop of almost 5000mm).

We are thrilled to have played a small part in making Bea’s of Bloomsbury’s ‘retail vision’ a reality. Congratulations to all the team at Bea’s!