Asbestos Garage Removal in Hove

Most people picture Hove as the Regency seafront, the stucco terraces and squares around Brunswick Town, Adelaide Crescent and Palmeira. Those streets are flats and maisonettes now, long split out of the original grand houses, and the garage problem is not really theirs. Off-street parking on a listed conservation frontage is rare, and a private lock-up rarer still. Walk inland towards Hangleton and Portslade and the picture changes completely. This is suburban Hove, interwar and postwar semis with front gardens, drives and detached garages standing apart from the house. That is where the corrugated cement roofs are, and that is the work this page is about.

A garage of this kind went up between the 1950s and the 1980s, and the cheap roofing sheet of that era was corrugated cement bonded with asbestos fibre. It was light, it was fireproof, it cost very little, and it ended up on garages, sheds and outbuildings across the whole country. A single-garage roof of this type carries around eight sheets, each one roughly 3 metres long, covering somewhere near 18 square metres once you add the pitch on both sides. Decades of Channel weather later, those same sheets have gone brittle, mossed over along the laps and started shedding fibre at the cracked and broken edges.

That is the material we are called out to remove. Not the listed seafront frontage, but the lock-up at the bottom of a Portslade garden that has quietly outlived its roof by thirty years or more, and the Hangleton semi where the garage roof has been patched with a tarpaulin nobody wants to lift.

On a standard suburban garage the roof is the quick part of the day. Stripping the sheets off a single-garage roof takes around three to four hours, with the fixings eased loose rather than forced, and each sheet lifted clear and wrapped before the next one is touched. There is normally no skip sitting out across a Hangleton verge or blocking a Portslade kerb, because the wrapped sheets go straight onto the van. The drive and the road stay clear, and the neighbours are not living alongside a heap of broken cement for a week.

With the asbestos gone the garage needs a new roof, and there are a few sensible routes. The common replacement is galvanised steel box-profile sheeting in a 0.7mm gauge, which is light, fast to fix down and far better at shrugging off the salt air this close to the sea than the original cement ever was. A three-layer torch-on felt build is the other popular choice where a flatter, quieter finish suits the structure better, and asbestos-free fibre cement sheets are there for owners who want to keep the look of the old corrugated roof without the hazard underneath it. Open soffits, fascias and exposed rafter ends can be boxed out in the same visit so the whole thing is finished in one go rather than left half done.

Graham runs these jobs himself, so the survey, the strip and the new roof are handled by the same people from the first look to the final clear-up. Hove is a long run down from our Chessington base in Surrey, much the same trip as Brighton right next door, and we are honest about that. This is not our local KT patch and we will not pretend it is. It is a job the licence, the method and the documented paperwork justify making the trip for, which is why we travel for the residential and commercial removals where exactly those things matter.