Asbestos Garage Removal in Kingston Upon Thames

Walk down almost any road of 1930s semis towards Berrylands, the Tudor Estate or New Malden and you pass the same thing again and again. A garage set back from the house or tucked along the side return, low and flat, with a roof of grey corrugated sheeting that has gone soft and mossy with the years. Most of these went up between the 1950s and the 1980s, and a good number of them are roofed in asbestos cement. The owner rarely thinks about it. The garage holds the mower and a few tins of paint, the car lives on the drive, and the roof just sits there weathering.

Behind the town-centre conversions it is the lock-ups that catch people out. Rows of older garages and stores behind the Victorian houses around the Fairfield and off the streets running back from Clarence Street and Eden Street, often shared, often a bit forgotten, frequently topped with the same cement sheet. Down by the Hogsmill there are older commercial and riverside units with the same roofs over them.

None of it is a problem while it is whole and left alone. It is the cracking, the drilling for a new bracket, the foot through a rotten sheet, or the decision to finally pull the old thing down that turns a quiet roof into loose fibres in the air. That is the point at which a Kingston garage stops being storage and becomes a job worth doing properly.

The aim is to get the sheets off in one piece. A whole sheet keeps the fibres locked in the cement where they belong, so we work along the roof unbolting and lifting rather than snapping or smashing. A single garage roof is usually somewhere between ten and twenty sheets depending on the size and pitch, and a straightforward single garage is normally off, wrapped and loaded inside three to four hours. The bulk of jobs are finished inside a single day.

Each sheet comes down whole, gets double-wrapped and labelled, and goes straight to a licensed disposal site with the waste paperwork to match. In most cases there is no skip on the drive, which keeps the road outside the house clear and the neighbours happy, a real consideration on the tighter terraced streets around Norbiton and Canbury where there is nowhere to put one anyway.

For the higher-risk licensed work, the kind needed when insulating board or a sprayed coating turns up, the standard steps up. We give the HSE the 14 days of notice the law requires, build a full enclosure around the work, and finish with four-stage clearance testing by an independent analyst before anyone calls the area clean. That is the difference between a bonded cement roof and a genuinely dangerous material, and we treat them as the two separate jobs they are.