Asbestos Clearance in Dorking

Dorking sits beneath Box Hill at the southern edge of the Surrey Hills, a market town where the railway arrived in the 1840s and the housing grew around it. Victorian and Edwardian terraces run off the High Street and South Street, older cottages thread through the centre, and the interwar and postwar decades filled in towards Pixham, North Holmwood and the Deepdene side of town. Almost all of it predates 2000, and that single fact is why asbestos clearance in Dorking is a steady part of what we do.

Asbestos was a standard building product in the UK until it was banned outright in 1999, so a home built before that date can hold it in any of the usual places. In Dorking the calls follow the local building stock closely. Corrugated cement garage and shed roofs sit at the top of the list, then textured artex on walls and ceilings in the pre-1990s terraces, old vinyl floor tiles and the black bitumen under them, cement soffits and rainwater goods on the interwar semis, and pipe lagging in the colder period cottages. Left alone and in good order, most of it poses little danger. It is age, weather and a weekend of DIY that turn a settled cement sheet into a real problem.

The most common job we get in the RH4 and RH5 postcodes is a garage or outbuilding roof, a corrugated cement sheet fitted at some point between the 1950s and the 1980s and weathered hard by every winter on the side of the North Downs ever since. We take those sheets down whole wherever they remain intact, double-wrap them, and run them straight to a licensed disposal facility. Keeping each sheet in one piece keeps the fibres locked in and the work clean, and most domestic clearances of this kind need no skip at all, so the driveway and the road stay clear throughout. The majority are finished inside a single day.

Once the asbestos is gone we check the area is clear before anything new goes up. If you want the garage back in use, we fit a replacement roof to suit the building: galvanised steel box-profile, three-layer torch-on felt, a flat or tiled roof, or asbestos-free fibre cement that matches the original look without the risk. Boxing out is an option too, where the old material is sealed and covered rather than removed, though full clearance is usually the cleaner long-term answer.