Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Wandsworth

Most of the floor tile work we get in Wandsworth starts the same way. Someone is doing up a kitchen or a hallway in an SW18 terrace, the old carpet or lino comes up, and underneath sits a layer of small, hard tiles in a dull brown, green or grey, often laid in a neat grid right across the room. They were a common floor finish in homes and flats from the 1950s through to the 1970s, and in a borough where so much of the housing was last modernised long before asbestos was banned in 1999, they turn up constantly. We see them under kitchen units in the terraces off Garratt Lane, in the hallways of the conversions around Wandsworth Common, and across the ground floors of the older flats near the river.

The tiles themselves are thermoplastic or vinyl, and the asbestos in them is bound tightly into the material. Left whole and walked on under another floor, they sit there quietly and do very little. The trouble begins when someone takes a bolster and a hammer to them to clear the room for new flooring, because that is when fibres can be released into the air of a home people are still living in. A floor sander run over them, or a kango used to lift them quickly, does the same thing and worse.

This is why we say have the floor checked before the chisel comes out, not after. A short look and a sample tells you what you are dealing with, and it costs a great deal less than putting right a room that has already been broken up and spread through the house. Plenty of people find these tiles, assume they are an ordinary old floor, and only stop to wonder once the dust is already up. Stopping at the point you find them, rather than carrying on, is the single thing that keeps a small job small.

Wandsworth floor jobs are nearly always in occupied property, a family terrace off East Hill, a conversion near Wandsworth Common, a flat in a shared block where a neighbour is on the other side of the wall. The work has to stay in the one room and not drift into the rest of the home, and that shapes how we set up. A kitchen or hallway floor opens straight onto the spaces a family uses every day, so containment is not a nicety here, it is the whole point.

We seal the room off before anything is lifted, run commercial-grade air filtration while the tiles and the bitumen come up, and keep the material contained as it is bagged and taken straight to a licensed disposal facility. On streets where parking is tight and a driveway is rare, taking it away cleanly rather than piling it up outside matters as much as the work indoors. Once the floor is clear, the air is tested before anyone uses the room again, so a kitchen or hallway goes back into use knowing it is genuinely clean and not just looking it. That test is the difference between a floor that has been tidied and a floor that has actually been dealt with.

Floor tiles and their adhesive are often lower-risk, non-licensed work, but that is decided by what the laboratory finds, never by a glance at the floor. Two floors that look the same can come back from the lab very differently, which is why anything suspect is sampled and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory first, with results usually back within a few working days. Knowing exactly what the tiles and the glue contain also tells us how the floor has to be handled, so we are never guessing on the day.