Asbestos Clearance in Putney

Putney runs down to the Thames in a dense grid of Victorian and Edwardian terraces, with mansion blocks and postwar infill behind the High Street and out along the Upper Richmond Road. Housing of that age, built and extended long before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, is exactly where the material tends to sit. Walk the streets between the river and Putney Heath, or the rows around the Dover House and Ashburton estates, and you are looking at building stock that was last modernised when asbestos cement, artex and tile adhesives were still standard.

In SW15 the danger usually has nothing to do with garages, because most homes here are terraces, flat conversions or purpose-built blocks. It hides in the everyday fabric instead: textured artex on ceilings and walls, vinyl floor tiles with their black bitumen backing, soffits and rainwater goods on the Edwardian terraces, pipe lagging in basements and around old heating runs, and loft materials in the upper flats. Left in place and undisturbed, almost all of it is harmless. The risk appears when someone starts work on it.

Cut, drilled, sanded or smashed, asbestos releases fibres into the air that cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, often decades after the exposure. That delay is what makes it so easy to underestimate, and it is the reason clearance is a licensed trade rather than a job for a skip and a free weekend.

Working in a Putney terrace or a flat in a shared block means keeping the rest of the building clean while we work. We seal off the affected room, run commercial-grade air filtration throughout, and test the air once the material is out, so nothing is left for the household or a neighbouring flat to breathe in. Intact material is taken out whole wherever possible and run straight to a licensed disposal facility, which keeps the fibres locked in and the job tidy on streets where there is rarely a driveway to work from. Most domestic clearances are finished within a single day.

Higher-risk materials such as pipe lagging and insulating board are handled to a stricter standard. Where the law calls for licensed work, we give the HSE the 14 days of notice it requires, work under full enclosure with air monitoring throughout, and finish with four-stage clearance testing by an independent analyst before the room is signed off.

If a roofline does need attention, whether on a terrace outrigger or an old outbuilding behind the house, we can replace what comes off with galvanised steel box-profile, three-layer torch-on felt, a flat or tiled finish, or asbestos-free fibre cement.