Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Croydon

Floors are where this one hides. Across the CR postcodes, in the converted Victorian houses around Thornton Heath, South Norwood and Selhurst, and in the kitchens of the postwar estates at New Addington and Fieldway, the same thing keeps surfacing during a refit. A floor that has been carpeted or covered in vinyl sheet for decades comes up, and underneath are square floor tiles bedded in a dark glue. The tiles are usually thermoplastic or vinyl. The glue is a black bitumen adhesive, and that is the part worth taking seriously.

The tiles themselves tend to be low risk while they are whole and flat. They were made hard, the asbestos is locked into the material, and lifting one or two intact does not throw much into the air. They come in a few familiar sizes, the small nine-inch squares in the older houses and larger ones in the later flats, often in muted reds, browns and greens that give their age away. The adhesive is the awkward part. It was spread straight onto the concrete screed, it has had fifty or sixty years to set, and it does not want to come up. People scrape at it, heat it, sand it, and that is exactly the moment fibres can be released. So the job is less about the tiles you can see and more about the black layer welded to the floor beneath them.

You cannot tell by eye whether a given floor contains asbestos. Plenty of later tiles and glues are perfectly clean. The only way to know is to take a small sample and have it tested at a UKAS-accredited laboratory before any of it is lifted. In an HMO or a let flat, where landlords across this part of Croydon manage a lot of older stock, that check is worth doing before a tenant moves out and the floor gets ripped up in a hurry.

Most of these floors are in homes people are still living in. A family in an Addiscombe terrace, tenants in a Selhurst conversion, someone in a flat in the centre of town. The floor often runs through a kitchen, a hall or a living room, the busiest rooms in the place, so the work has to be contained or fibres will drift everywhere.

The room is sealed off before anything is lifted. Doorways and any gaps are closed up, surfaces are protected, and air movement is controlled so dust cannot travel into the rest of the house. The tiles come up first, then the adhesive is taken off the screed under the same containment. Waste is bagged as it goes rather than left in a heap. When the floor is clear and the area has been cleaned down, an air test is carried out before the seals come off, so nobody steps back into the room until the air has been checked and is clear. That last step matters most in a busy household or a let property, where the kitchen and hallway cannot stay out of use for long and you need to know the space is genuinely safe to walk back into.

Much of this floor tile work sits in the non-licensed category, which keeps a single room manageable without weeks of notice. Where a job tips into higher-risk licensed work, the rules step up: fourteen days of notice to the HSE before it starts, a full sealed enclosure, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst who does not work for us. The category is decided by what the lab finds and what is actually being disturbed, never guessed on the day.