Asbestos Clearance in Wimbledon

Wimbledon splits in two. Up the hill sits the Village, with its Georgian and early Victorian houses ranged around the green and the wide expanse of Wimbledon Common behind. Down below, the town that grew once the railway arrived is denser and later, rows of Victorian and Edwardian terraces around the centre and Wimbledon Park, then the 1930s semis that march out towards Raynes Park and South Wimbledon. The All England Club draws the world here for a fortnight each summer, but for the other fifty weeks this is simply a large slice of established south-west London housing.

That long span of building is exactly why asbestos turns up so often in Wimbledon. The material was not banned outright in the UK until 1999, so any home built or altered before 2000, which covers most of the borough, can contain it. None of it is a problem while it sits undisturbed. It is weather, age and the disruption of a renovation that turn a quiet cement sheet into a genuine risk.

When asbestos is drilled, cut or broken up, it releases fibres far too fine to see. Breathed in, they cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, often decades after the exposure itself. That delay is precisely why clearance is a licensed trade and not a job for a skip and a spare afternoon.

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

With the asbestos gone and the area checked clear, we can fit a replacement to suit the building. The usual choices are galvanised steel box-profile, three-layer torch-on felt, a flat or tiled roof, or asbestos-free fibre cement. Boxing out is an option where you would rather cover and protect a sound surface than replace it.

Higher-risk materials are handled to a stricter standard set in law. We give the HSE the fourteen days of notice that licensed work requires, run the job under full enclosure with air monitoring throughout, and finish with four-stage clearance testing by an independent analyst before the space is signed back into use.

Plenty of Wimbledon asbestos never reaches a garage roof. If you are about to disturb artex or lift old tiles during a renovation in a pre-2000 home, have it tested first. Where it has to come out, we isolate the room, run commercial-grade air filtration, and test the air afterwards so nothing is left behind for the rest of the house to breathe.

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 the law requires before building work or a knock-through. Both come with a written report you can hand straight to a builder or a buyer.

For larger projects we take on soft strip-outs and full demolition, taking 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. We hold Spectra licence number 142305706, we have spent more than seven years working across Wimbledon and the wider SW postcodes, and every job closes with the certificates that prove it was done properly. To arrange a free site visit, call us on 0800 024 6168.