Asbestos Clearance in Cobham

Cobham runs along the River Mole in the Elmbridge corner of Surrey, an old coaching village on the Portsmouth Road that grew into one of the county's larger commuter settlements. The heart of it is still period: Victorian and Edwardian houses around Church Street and the High Street, a scatter of older cottages near the river, and then wave after wave of interwar and postwar building out through Oxshott, Stoke D'Abernon and the Fairmile. A good deal of that older stock has been extended, modernised and re-roofed over the years, and almost all of it went up before 2000, which is exactly why asbestos clearance in Cobham keeps us busy.

Asbestos was used freely across the UK building trade until it was banned in 1999, so any property built before then can hold it. In Cobham the pattern is familiar. Corrugated cement garage and shed roofs come up most often, followed by textured artex on ceilings and walls in the pre-1990s houses, vinyl floor tiles and the dark adhesive beneath them, cement soffits and guttering on the 1930s semis, and pipe lagging in the older, colder properties. In sound condition and left undisturbed, most of it is harmless. The danger arrives with age, weather and the kind of DIY that cracks or cuts the material open.

By a wide margin, the most common call across the KT11 postcode is a garage or outbuilding roof, a corrugated cement sheet fitted somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s and weathered ever since. We take those sheets down whole wherever they are still intact, double-wrap them, and carry them straight to a licensed disposal facility. Lifting each sheet in one piece keeps the fibres contained and the site tidy, and most jobs of this kind are managed without a skip, so the drive and the road stay clear. The bulk of domestic clearances are wrapped up inside one day.

With the asbestos cleared we confirm the area is clean before any new roof goes on. If you want the garage back in service we fit a replacement to suit the building: galvanised steel box-profile, three-layer torch-on felt, a flat or tiled roof, or asbestos-free fibre cement that keeps the original appearance without the risk. Boxing out, where the material is sealed and covered instead of removed, is also on the table, though a full clearance is usually the tidier long-term choice.