Asbestos Floor Tile Removal in Woking
Asbestos floor tile removal across Woking, from Horsell and Old Woking to Knaphill and Goldsworth Park. Old thermoplastic tiles and the black bitumen glue under them, lifted and cleared safely during a kitchen or floor refit.
When the Old Floor Comes Up in Woking
It usually starts with a refit. Someone in a Knaphill semi pulls back the kitchen lino, or strips the carpet out of a hallway in an Old Woking terrace, and underneath sits a layer of small, hard floor tiles in a dull beige, brown or green. They are often nine inches square, laid in a tight grid, and they were a standard floor covering across Woking for decades. You find them in kitchens, hallways, utility rooms, downstairs toilets and under the stairs in the interwar and postwar housing out towards Goldsworth Park, Sheerwater and St John's. Most of it went down well before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999.
Those tiles are thermoplastic or vinyl, and a good number of them contain asbestos. On their own they are fairly low risk, hard, sealed and not the sort of thing that sheds fibres while you walk on it. The trouble is what you do next. Lifting them, snapping them with a bolster, or grinding the floor back to bare screed is exactly the kind of work that breaks the material up and puts fibres into the air of a room you are about to live in. A floor that has sat there safely for fifty years can become a problem in the first hour of a DIY refit.
None of it can be told apart by eye. Colour, size and pattern tell you nothing reliable, and two tiles that look identical can come back from the lab completely differently. So anything we suspect in a Woking floor is sampled and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory before a single tile is lifted. Results usually land within a few working days, and we will not start the job until we know exactly what is under the floor.
The Black Bitumen Glue Underneath
The tiles are rarely the hard part. Underneath almost all of them sits a layer of black, tar-like adhesive, bedded straight into the screed, and that bitumen glue is where the real work tends to be. It was the standard way of sticking floor tiles down in the older Woking houses, and it can carry asbestos too. Long after a tile lifts away clean, the black residue stays stuck fast to the floor.
This is the bit a kitchen fitter or a flooring company will often hit and stop on. Tiles peel up in an afternoon. The adhesive does not. It is stubborn, it spreads across the whole footprint of the floor, and scraping or sanding it off dry is precisely how you turn a contained job into a roomful of fibres. We treat the glue as the main event, not an afterthought, and we plan the removal around getting both the tiles and the bitumen off the screed without disturbing the rest of the room.
That matters most in a home you are still living in. A floor refit in a Horsell hallway opens straight onto the rest of the house, so the work cannot be allowed to drift fibres into the kitchen or up the stairs while the family is in. It also matters for the floor itself. Lay new tiles or a wood floor straight over old asbestos adhesive and you have simply hidden the problem, ready for the next person to find when they lift your work in twenty years. The point of doing it properly is that the screed underneath is left clean and ready for whatever floor goes down next, with nothing dangerous sealed under it.
Keeping the Work Contained in an Occupied Home
Most floor tile jobs are in houses that are still in use, so the first job is to stop the work from spreading anywhere it should not. We seal the room off from the rest of the property, screen the doorways, and shut down any route the air could carry dust along. The floor is kept damp as the tiles come up so the material stays heavy and low rather than drifting, and the tiles are eased off whole wherever they will come rather than smashed.
With the tiles lifted, we work the black bitumen adhesive off the screed under the same controlled conditions, bagging the tiles and the glue residue as we go and running the waste to a licensed facility. The whole footprint of the floor is cleared, not just the easy middle, because a strip of glue left along the skirting is still asbestos. Keeping it all contained is what stops a single kitchen floor turning into a problem for the whole house. When the floor is clear, we run an air test inside the sealed area before anyone comes back in, so you are not taking it on trust that the room is safe to use again.
Most domestic floors are confined to one or two rooms, which keeps these jobs short and the disruption limited. A typical kitchen or hallway is dealt with quickly rather than dragging on for days. You get a clean screed, no skip cluttering the drive in most cases, and a floor ready for tiling or boarding straight after.
Sampling, Testing and the Paperwork
If you are about to start a refit anywhere in Woking and you have hit tiles you did not expect, the cheapest first move is to have them tested rather than guess. We take a small sample of the tile and the adhesive under controlled conditions, send it to a UKAS-accredited lab, and tell you in a few working days whether there is asbestos under the floor at all. It is a small cost set against the risk of grinding the wrong thing up in your own kitchen.
Most floor tile and bitumen removal is non-licensed work, but it is still controlled work and it is still done to a proper standard, with the room sealed, the waste bagged and tracked, and the air tested before the space goes back into use. Where a survey turns up higher-risk licensed materials elsewhere in the property, we handle those to the stricter standard the law sets out, giving the HSE the 14 days' notice required, working under full enclosure with air monitoring throughout, and finishing with four-stage clearance testing by an independent analyst before the area is signed off.
Either way the job ends with the paperwork that proves it was done legally, including a waste consignment note showing the material went to a licensed facility and the air-test results for the room. We hold Spectra licence number 142305706 and have cleared floors and other asbestos across Woking and the wider Surrey GU postcodes for more than seven years. To arrange a free site visit and have your floor sampled before the refit starts, call the team on 0800 024 6168.
Licensed Asbestos Removal, Woking
Woking, Surrey · Licensed Removal
View this project"Clearaway Asbestos did a brilliant job coming out to survey our old garage roof for asbestos. They were professional and we were impressed with the job they did replacing the garage roof"
Our Removal Process
From first call to final certificate, every job follows the same clear four-step process.
Survey
We inspect the property and confirm the material. Sampling available if required.
Quote
Fixed written price covering removal, disposal and any replacement work.
Removal
Material is removed safely, double-wrapped and taken to a licensed disposal facility.
Certificate
You receive a waste consignment note and disposal certificate confirming legal handling.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Choose Clearaway
Specialist Crew
Asbestos work is all we do, every day, across the South East.
Fully Licensed
Licensed asbestos removal contractor (Licence No. 142305706). Full public liability insurance on every job.
Local & Fast
Surrey-based. Most domestic jobs are booked in and finished within a week.
Our Own Team
We never subcontract. The people who quote your job are the people who do it.
Get in Touch
Send a few details about your project and we will come back the same working day with a fixed price. We cover Surrey, London and the South East, including Esher, Cobham, Kingston, Richmond, Epsom, Guildford, Woking and Croydon.