Asbestos Garage Removal in Kensington

Drive through most of Kensington and you will not see the rows of pebbledash semis with a garage at the side that you get further out of town. W8, SW7 and SW5 went up mostly in the nineteenth century, white stucco terraces around Kensington Square and Stanford Road, red-brick mansion blocks along Cromwell Road and Earls Court Road, and the housing was never built around the car. People parked on the street then and they park on the street now. Plenty of the tall houses were long ago split into flats and maisonettes, which only pushed parking further out to the kerb.

What external structures exist tend to hide. There are the cobbled mews behind the grand frontages, once stables and coach houses, many now garages or knocked through into homes. There are flat-roof extensions tucked at the back of the larger houses around Holland Park and Campden Hill, and the odd outbuilding behind a period house. A handful of these still have a corrugated cement roof or cement panels on them, fitted somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s and left to weather ever since.

So we will say it plainly. If you have a mews garage or coach house with an old cement roof, or a flat-roof extension or outbuilding with cement sheets on top, that is a job we do all the time. But the honest picture is that most of the asbestos we deal with in Kensington is not on a garage at all. It is indoors, in the fabric of period flats and houses, and we cover that on the ceiling, floor tile and survey pages rather than dress it up as roof work here.

Once the cement is off you have a bare structure, so the next question is what goes back on. On a mews garage or outbuilding most people go for a galvanised steel box-profile roof, which is light, quick to fit and lasts. A flat-roof extension behind one of the larger houses is more often suited to a three-layer torch-on felt finish, and from the ground that reads as a plain flat roof. A tiled roof or asbestos-free fibre cement sheet are both options too, and where there is old cement panelling on a wall or soffit we can box it out in a clean modern board instead.

Kensington adds a layer most areas do not. Much of the borough is conservation area and a great many houses and mansion blocks are listed, so even a small roof at the back can mean checking whether the wider project needs listed building consent, and choosing a replacement that suits the setting rather than whatever is cheapest. A mews with no driveway means parking suspensions and a bit of access planning before anyone turns up. Original plasterwork and joinery near the work get covered and protected, and on a shared mews we keep the entry clear so the neighbours can still come and go.

None of that changes the asbestos job itself. It just means we plan the access, the parking and the timing around the building before the first sheet comes down. If the roof sits over a flat-roof extension that backs onto other homes, we work out the lift and the route for the wrapped sheets in advance, so nothing waits around in a shared space. The aim is a day that runs cleanly in a spot where there is genuinely no room for mess, then a tidy new roof on top and the site handed back as we found it.