I have 2 of those Rutlands 1500mm benches, and one of their (now discontinued) smaller one.
Don't assume that because I have 3 they're the bees knees, but the 1500mm ones don't totally suck.
I'd have preferred to make my own, but lumber in the UK is painfully expensive and I was just starting to put together a small wood shop after moving to the UK from Canada. Few tools meant making a semi-decent bench of the sort I was used to having wouldn't have been easy, so I bought a small bench first. It kinda sucked, and I regretted not buying the bigger one - so I bought the bigger 1500mm one. Worked out ok, so I bought a second one.
Upsides: Hardwood, cheap, sturdy, 2 cheap-but-serviceable vices. You won't fall in love with them, which means you won't hesitate to modify them to suit your needs - i.e. more dog holes, adding/changing vices, etc.
Downsides: they're fairly light for workbenches. They're also on the short side for me, but that's easy to fix by bolting risers on to the feet of the bench.
Working in an apartment (my shop is in my kitchen/dining area) I use a lot of hand tools - so one bench is set up for dimensioning lumber. The lightish weight of the bench means that jointing and planing boards can be a bit of a pain - the bench will move. Now part of that is because half the bench is on linoleum and the other half is on carpet, but if the bench weighed another 50kilos it would be a big help. I do plan on modifying that bench to add weight and increase my work holding options, but as it stands it's not a bad bench.
Keeping in mind I bought them when they were on sale for £200 each. Buying enough cheap pine from my local lumber yard for a bench would have cost me £150, so the extra £50 was a fair price to pay to have a hardwood bench I could use right away. Not to mention the 2 vices.
Another option you might want to look at is to buy an oak counter top from Ikea -
http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/produ ... #/50273795
They're cheap - the beech ones are £80 for L: 186 cm/D: 63.5 cm/ Thickness: 2.8 cm
Make up some trestle style legs from 100x100 fenceposts and bolt them to the top and you'd have a rock solid bench that you could tweak and modify to suite your needs as you went along. Or buy two of the tops and glue them together to create a 2" thick worktop that would be practically bulletproof.
Sorry for the rambling response, but in a nutshell the Rutlands bench isn't a bad deal when it's on sale. There are other options if you can spend a little more time in putting the bench together, but if you can't then you'll not likely be too unhappy with the Rutlands one.
Oh, and they really shouldn't call it a joiners bench. It's... really not.
dak.
(edit - I just looked up the price I paid for them and adjusted my post - I'd thought I'd paid 248, I actually paid 199 - same price they are now it looks like.)
