Asbestos Garage Removal in Chiswick
Out towards Gunnersbury and Grove Park, Chiswick's Edwardian and 1930s houses came with brick or concrete garages, and many still wear their original corrugated cement roofs. Those sheets are the job we take down whole and clear away.
The cement garage roof on the suburban stock
Walk the residential streets running west from Turnham Green towards Gunnersbury and Grove Park and the pattern repeats house after house. Edwardian and 1930s semis, a side return, and a garage at the end of the drive. Plenty of those garages were roofed in corrugated cement sheet, the grey ridged material that was the cheap and quick choice for decades. It was a standard fitting from the 1950s through to the 1980s, and on a garage that has not been altered since, the roof you are looking at is the roof that went on when the garage was built.
The sheets were made with asbestos fibre bound into the cement, which is what gave them their strength and their long life. While they sit there intact and painted they are stable, and they will not shed anything into the air. The trouble is weather. Forty, fifty, sixty years of frost, sun and London rain leave the surface chalky and brittle, moss takes hold in the valleys, and a sheet that is cracked, drilled or flaking is a sheet that can release fibres when it is disturbed.
Asbestos was not banned in this country until 1999, so any sheet fitted before then is treated as suspect until a test says otherwise. A garage roof from the middle of the last century sits squarely inside that window. That is why we never advise pulling one down over a weekend with a ladder and a crowbar. The material is manageable, but only if it is handled as the regulated waste it is.
It is worth knowing what you are dealing with before a new car or workshop gear goes under that roof, or before any building work touches it. A garage roof is one of the most common places asbestos still turns up on these streets, from the smaller plots near Turnham Green to the wider drives towards Grove Park, and it is also one of the easier ones to deal with cleanly, which is why it is rarely worth the gamble of doing it yourself.
How we strip a single garage roof
A single garage roof is a small, contained job, and we treat it as one. The covering is normally around eight corrugated sheets, each one roughly three metres long, making a roof of about eighteen square metres. We do not break the sheets up. They come down whole, unbolted from the purlins one at a time, lowered by hand rather than dropped, then double-wrapped in heavy sheeting and taped. That keeps the fibre locked in and the mess down to nothing.
Most single-garage strips run to three or four hours on site, start to finish. There is no skip parked across the drive, because the wrapped sheets go straight onto the van and away to a licensed disposal facility. That matters on a Chiswick street where kerbside space is tight and a skip would block a neighbour for days, and where the bays fill early. The drive stays clear, the road stays clear, and we leave a swept, bare frame ready for whatever roof goes back on.
Corrugated cement on a domestic garage is lower-risk, non-licensed work when the sheets are sound and handled properly, so it does not need the fourteen days of written HSE notice or the full sealed enclosure that licensed jobs carry. We still suit up, damp the sheets down to hold the fibre, and bag the offcuts and bolts to the same standard as anything else. The risk is low when the work is done right and high when someone snaps the sheets up dry. If a sheet is already badly broken, or there is any doubt over what the material is, we have it sampled before we start so nobody is guessing.
Putting a new roof back on
Once the old roof is gone the garage needs covering again, and there are a few sensible routes depending on the building and what you want to spend. Galvanised steel box-profile sheeting in a 0.7mm gauge is the modern equivalent of the old corrugated look. It bolts straight onto the existing timbers, sheds water fast, will not go brittle, and gives you another few decades out of the structure. For a flat or near-flat garage roof, three-layer torch-on felt builds up a sealed, hard-wearing finish that copes with standing water far better than a single layer.
A tiled pitch or modern asbestos-free fibre cement sheet are the other two options, and which one fits depends on the pitch of your garage and how it sits against the house. Whatever goes back on, we can box out the eaves and verges so the new roof reads as finished joinery rather than a patch, which counts on a frontage that faces the street.
A fair number of these garages sit behind larger houses that have since been split into flats, particularly on the bigger plots towards Grove Park. We work around shared access and parking so the household is not boxed in while the job runs, and we keep the working area to the drive. Where a garage falls inside the Bedford Park or Chiswick Mall conservation areas, the replacement is planned around the restrictions and the original fabric is protected, so the new roof keeps a sympathetic profile rather than clashing with a listed terrace or its neighbours.
Booking a Chiswick garage roof in
If you are not certain whether your garage roof contains asbestos, we can settle that before any work is booked. You cannot tell weathered corrugated cement apart from a safe modern sheet by eye, and a wrong guess either way costs you. A small sample is taken under controlled conditions and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory, and the result comes back in a few working days. From there you know exactly what you are dealing with and what the strip will involve, with no surprises once we are on site.
Graham runs the jobs himself, so the person who comes out to quote your roof is the person who does the work. That keeps everything straightforward, whether it is a single garage off the drive near Gunnersbury or a row of lock-ups behind a converted house off Chiswick High Road. We give you a clear price for taking the old roof down and clearing it, and a separate figure for the replacement, so you can see what each part costs and decide what you want done. If you only want the asbestos gone and a roofer of your own back on afterwards, that is fine too.
Clearaway has worked across this part of west London for more than seven years and holds Spectra licence number 142305706. To talk through your garage roof or get it booked in, call 0800 024 6168.
Concrete Asbestos Garage Removal, Epsom
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View this project"Graham and his team done an excellent job of removing and replacing my asbestos garage roof and I wouldn't hesitate in recommending them"
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.