Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Kensington

Pull up the carpet or worn lino in a flat off Kensington Square or a maisonette on Earls Court Road, and the layer underneath is rarely the original. Somewhere in the stack you often find small square floor tiles, the thermoplastic and vinyl sort laid through the middle of the last century, when these tall houses were being carved into flats and the floors were redone to suit. They sit there, covered and forgotten, until a kitchen refit or a new wood floor brings them back into the light. A buyer pulls back a rug in a Stanford Road flat, a builder lifts the old kitchen vinyl, and there they are.

The tiles themselves are usually the easy part. It is the black, tarry adhesive bedded into the screed beneath them that tends to be the real job. That bitumen glue can hold asbestos, it grips hard, and it does not lift cleanly. On a floor in a Cromwell Road mansion block we often find the tiles come away in minutes while the adhesive stays stuck fast across the whole room. The original layers in these conversions sit one on top of another, so what looks like a single old floor can be tiles over adhesive over screed, with a newer covering on top hiding the lot.

You cannot tell by eye whether either layer contains asbestos. The colour and the age are hints, not proof, so the right first move is a sample sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory before anyone takes a scraper to the floor. We take a small piece under controlled conditions, the tile and a scrap of the adhesive both, and wait for the result rather than guessing from the look of it. That short pause at the start saves a lot of mess later.

Almost every floor we lift in Kensington is in a home someone is still living in. These are flats and mansion blocks with shared stairwells, a front door onto a common landing, and no driveway to stage the work from. There is no spare wing to move into while the kitchen is out, so the job has to be sealed off from the rest of the flat and from the neighbours on the same stair. A floor that runs from the kitchen straight into the living room makes that containment the whole job, not a detail.

We close off the room and tape the doorways, run the floor work under controlled conditions, and keep the dust from the tiles and the adhesive contained rather than letting it drift down the hall or out to the landing. The floor is the one surface you cannot avoid walking back over, so we keep a clean route in and out and change the way we move through the flat to match. Waste goes into sealed, labelled bags and is carried out the way we came in, which on a tall converted house can mean several flights down a narrow stair. None of that works without planning the route first.

In many of these blocks the lift is small or out of bounds for building work, and parking is suspended rather than assumed, so access is agreed before the day. When the floor is clear of tiles and adhesive and cleaned down, the air is tested before anyone moves back into the room. That last check matters most in a flat where the kitchen and the living space sit only a door apart, because the people living there are the ones who use the floor the moment the work is signed off.