Asbestos Clearance in Sutton

Sutton was a small Surrey village until the railway reached it in 1847, and almost everything you see today went up after that. The town spread out through the Edwardian years and then filled in hard between the wars, which is why so much of the housing across the SM1, SM2 and SM3 postcodes is interwar semi-detached with garages and outbuildings tacked on later. That suburban building boom ran for decades before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, so the material is woven into the fabric of the borough.

You see the same story in Cheam, Carshalton and Worcester Park, where rows of 1930s semis and postwar estates carry corrugated cement garage roofs, textured artex and old floor tiles as standard. Belmont and the higher ground towards Banstead are no different. None of it is a problem while it sits undisturbed, but Sutton is a borough of busy homeowners, and it is the weekend loft conversion or the garage strip-out that turns a quiet cement sheet into airborne fibre.

That is the moment the risk appears. Broken, drilled or sanded asbestos releases fibres that cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, often thirty or forty years after exposure. Removing it properly is a licensed trade, not a job for a hired skip and a Saturday, and Clearaway Asbestos has spent more than seven years doing exactly that work across Sutton and the wider SM postcodes.

When the job is a Sutton garage roof, and most are, we take the sheets down whole wherever they remain 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 finish 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.

Plenty of Sutton asbestos never reaches the garage. If you are about to disturb artex or pull up old tiles in a renovation, have it tested first. Where it has to come out, we isolate the area, run commercial-grade air filtration, and test the air afterwards so nothing is left for the rest of the house to breathe in.

We carry out the two standard surveys as well. A management survey locates and assesses material in a home that is staying lived-in, while a refurbishment and demolition survey is the more intrusive inspection needed before building work or a knock-through. Both come with a written report you can hand straight to a builder or a buyer.

For bigger projects we take on soft strip-outs and full demolition, stripping a property back to its structure ahead of a rebuild. Having one contractor handle the survey, the asbestos and the strip keeps the job moving and the responsibility in one place. To book a free site visit anywhere in Sutton, call the team on 0800 024 6168 and we will arrange a date that suits you.