Asbestos Clearance in Chertsey

Chertsey sits on the Thames in the borough of Runnymede, an old market town with Chertsey Bridge on one side and the M25 and M3 running close by. The streets around the centre, Guildford Street and Windsor Street among them, carry Victorian and Edwardian terraces. Walk out from there and the housing changes: interwar and postwar semis and detached homes spreading across the KT16 postcode, some properties sitting close to the river, and a number of the larger houses now split into flats. Thorpe sits to one side, Addlestone, Ottershaw and Weybridge to the others, so a Chertsey job often pulls in the same kinds of homes found right across that corner of Surrey.

That range of building dates is the reason asbestos is so common here. The UK did not ban it fully until 1999, so almost everything put up or altered before then could contain it somewhere. A terrace near the town centre, a 1950s semi out towards Addlestone or Ottershaw, a riverside property with cellars, a converted house near Weybridge: each can hold the material in a different spot. The place explains the problem, and the problem repeats from street to street. Two houses on the same road can be built a decade apart and carry the material in completely different places, which is why no two clearances in the town look quite the same.

Clearaway works the whole town from a base in Chessington, KT9, a reasonable run up the road. The owner, Graham, runs the jobs himself rather than handing them to a passing crew, so the person quoting the work is the person carrying it out. That matters on the older Chertsey stock, where a quick look at a roofline or a ceiling is worth more from someone who has lifted a hundred of them than from a sales visit.

The first step is sampling. A small piece of the suspect material is cut under controlled conditions and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory, with results back in a few working days. That confirms what is actually present before anyone commits to removal, and it stops money being spent stripping out a material that turns out to be clean. It also sets the method, because the result decides whether a job is a straightforward removal or one that has to meet the stricter licensed standard.

Once a result is in, lower-risk material is taken out whole rather than broken up, double-bagged or wrapped, and carried away to a licensed disposal facility with the paperwork to match. Most domestic clearances run without a skip, which keeps a narrow Chertsey drive and the kerb outside clear, and the bulk of single jobs are done inside one working day. A garage roof, an artex ceiling, a tiled floor: each is a contained piece of work with a clear start and finish, and the area is cleaned down before anyone moves back in.

The load on the day depends on what the survey or sample turns up. One property might need a single shed roof lifted; another, a converted house near the centre, might need AIB removed from two flats and a hallway floor taken back to the screed. A riverside house might be all about lagging in the cellar and nothing above ground. The method holds steady across all of it: confirm first, remove whole, dispose properly, leave the place clean. None of it relies on guesswork about how old the building looks from the road.