Asbestos Clearance in Leatherhead

Leatherhead is an old market town on the River Mole, with a historic core that runs from timber-framed buildings and the centuries-old Running Horse inn through to Georgian and Victorian frontages around the High Street. Out from that centre, the town spread through the late-Victorian and Edwardian years and then filled in substantially between the wars and after them, with large suburban estates across Fetcham, Ashtead and Bookham. The bulk of that housing, spread across the KT22 and KT23 postcodes, went up long before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999.

That building history is why asbestos cement and artex are so common in Leatherhead homes. The older properties near the town centre and along the Mole tend to hide it in pipe lagging, old floor tiles and the occasional boiler flue, while the interwar and postwar semis out towards Fetcham and Ashtead carry it in corrugated garage roofs, cement soffits and textured artex ceilings. Bookham and the estates on the edge of the North Downs follow the same pattern. Left undisturbed almost all of it is harmless, and it is the renovation, the loft job or the tired garage roof that turns a quiet cement sheet into a genuine hazard.

The danger is in the dust it gives off. When asbestos is cracked, drilled or broken up it releases fibres that cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, often thirty or forty years after the work was done. Clearing it safely is a licensed trade, not a job for a hired skip and a spare afternoon, and Clearaway Asbestos has worked across Leatherhead and the wider Surrey KT postcodes for more than seven years.

When the job is a Leatherhead garage roof, and most are, we take the sheets down whole wherever they are still intact and run them straight to a licensed facility. Keeping them in one piece keeps the fibres contained and the work tidy, and in most cases we manage it without a skip, so the drive and the road stay clear. The majority of domestic clearances are finished in a single day.

With the asbestos gone, we check the area is clear before anything new goes up. If you want the garage back in use, we fit a replacement to suit the building, whether that is galvanised steel box-profile, three-layer torch-on felt, a flat or tiled roof, or asbestos-free fibre cement. Boxing out is an option if you would rather cover and protect than replace.

Higher-risk materials are handled to a stricter standard. We give the HSE the 14 days' notice the law requires, work under full enclosure with air monitoring throughout, and finish with four-stage clearance testing by an independent analyst before the space is signed off. We hold Spectra licence number 142305706, and every job ends with the certificates that prove it was done legally.