Asbestos Clearance in Twickenham

Twickenham sits on a bend of the Thames that has been built on for centuries, from Horace Walpole's Gothic Strawberry Hill House to the terraces that fill the streets around the town centre and St Margarets. The riverside village character is still there, but the bulk of the housing dates from the Victorian and Edwardian decades, with Whitton and the outer streets filling in between the wars. Twickenham Stadium has stood as the home of English rugby since 1909, and a good deal of the surrounding housing is older still. All of it predates the year asbestos was banned in the UK, which came in 1999.

That long building history is why asbestos cement and artex turn up so often across the TW1 and TW2 postcodes. The Victorian terraces near the centre tend to hide it in old floor tiles, pipe lagging and the odd boiler flue, while the interwar semis out towards Whitton carry it in garage roofs, soffits and textured ceilings. Strawberry Hill and the streets down towards the river follow the same pattern. Left alone it does no harm, and it is the renovation, the loft job or the tired garage roof that turns it into a genuine hazard.

The danger is in the dust. When asbestos is cracked, drilled or broken up it releases fibres that lodge in the lungs and cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, often decades after the work was done. That is why clearance is a licensed trade, and Clearaway Asbestos has worked across Twickenham and the wider TW postcodes for more than seven years.

When the job is a Twickenham 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.