Asbestos Garage Removal in Richmond
Behind the Georgian terraces near Richmond Green and the villas towards Kew, plenty of homes still keep a low cement-roofed garage from the post-war decades. Taking that asbestos roof down safely is what we handle here in TW9 and TW10.
The Cement Garage Roof Hidden Off Richmond's Lanes
Drive the side roads off Richmond Hill, or the streets running back from the riverside towards East Sheen, and you keep finding the same thing tucked behind the house. A single garage with a shallow pitched roof of corrugated cement sheet, grey and gone slightly green with moss. Most of these went up between the 1950s and the 1980s, when a family added off-street parking to an Edwardian villa or a 1930s semi, and the cheap, fireproof sheet of the day was the obvious choice.
That sheet is almost always bonded asbestos cement. It has sat through forty or fifty Richmond winters by now, so the surface has weathered, the bolts have rusted, and hairline cracks have opened along the corrugations. Left alone and undisturbed it is low risk. The trouble starts when someone climbs up to clear leaves, drills a fixing for a light, or simply lets a sheet crack apart under a fallen branch. That is the moment fibres get released, and it is the moment people start asking what the roof is actually made of. It is rarely just the roof, either, since the same era often left an asbestos shed roof in the back garden and sometimes a cement panel in the garage wall.
People tend to notice the garage first because it is the largest run of sheet on the plot and the one they can see going green. A buyer's surveyor flags it, a builder refuses to touch it, or the roof finally starts shedding flakes onto the car, and that is when the phone call comes. Graham, who owns Clearaway and runs the local jobs himself, has seen this roof on garages all over the borough. The shape barely changes from street to street. What changes is what sits around it, and in Richmond that usually means planning rules.
Listed Streets, Conservation Rules, Tight Access
Large parts of Richmond are conservation areas, and a good number of the Georgian and Victorian houses are listed. That does not stop us removing an asbestos garage roof, but it does shape how the day runs. On these streets the work rarely happens in isolation. It tends to sit inside a wider project, so we plan it around any listed building consent or conservation-area conditions that already apply, and around the original fabric the rules are there to protect, the cornices, the joinery, the panelling.
Access and parking are the parts people underestimate. Many of these houses sit on narrow lanes with parking restrictions, permit bays, and tight notification rules before work can start on certain streets. So we plan the van, the loading, and the unloading around those restrictions rather than turning up and hoping. A garage tucked at the end of a shared drive, or reached through a side return barely wide enough to carry a sheet, changes the order we work in, and it is far better to know that before the day than to discover it on the morning. The good news for a standard garage is that there is usually no skip. The sheets come off whole and are stacked and wrapped on site, which keeps the drive and the road clear and means no skip permit to chase.
We take the roof down in one piece at a time. No breaking, no smashing, no power tools through the asbestos. Each corrugated sheet is unbolted, lowered by hand, double-wrapped in heavy gauge plastic, labelled, and loaded for disposal at a licensed site. For most single garages in Richmond that is a contained, low-disruption morning, not a building site that swallows the week.
What A Single Garage Roof Actually Involves
A typical single garage roof in this part of Surrey is somewhere around three metres by five, and that works out to roughly ten to fourteen corrugated sheets depending on the overlap and the run. It is a predictable job. On a dry day with clear access, taking that roof down, wrapping it, and clearing the area runs to about three to four hours. Bigger or twin garages, or a roof with a lot of moss and seized bolts, take longer, but the single lock-up garage is the bread and butter of this work.
Most of these garages do not need the full licensed setup. Bonded cement sheet on a domestic garage is usually non-licensed work, which keeps it straightforward and keeps the cost sensible. Where a job does tip into higher-risk licensed territory, perhaps because there is sprayed coating, pipe lagging in an attached cellar, or asbestos insulating board lining the structure, the rules are firm and we follow them to the letter. That means 14 days of written notice to the HSE before work begins, a full enclosure around the area, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before anyone uses the space again. The samples involved go to a UKAS-accredited laboratory, so the result is one a builder or a buyer can rely on.
We will always tell you which category your garage falls into before we lift a single sheet, and we will not dress up a simple cement-roof job as something larger than it is.
A New Roof, And Who To Call In Richmond
Once the asbestos is gone you have a bare garage and a choice to make. The cheapest and quickest replacement is galvanised steel box-profile sheet, which goes back on the same frame and gives you a clean grey roof for years. If you want something that sits more quietly behind a period property, a three-layer torch-on felt roof on a flat deck, a tiled pitch to match the house, or modern asbestos-free fibre cement all work well. We can also box out the exposed timbers and trim so the finished garage looks tidy from the lane, which matters when the house behind it is listed and people notice the details.
If the garage shares a wall or a roofline with the house, or sits inside a larger renovation, we will fit the timing around the rest of the build so the asbestos stage does not hold everything else up. That is the usual pattern in Richmond. The garage roof is one item on a longer list, and our job is to clear it cleanly and get out of the way. We can also point you towards what comes next, whether that is a roofer for the new covering or a builder picking the project back up, so the gap between the asbestos coming off and the new roof going on stays short.
Clearaway is based just up the road in Chessington, holds Spectra licence number 142305706, and has spent more than seven years working on garages, sheds and outbuildings across Richmond and the surrounding towns. If you have a cement garage roof in TW9 or TW10 you want looked at, call Graham on 0800 024 6168.
Concrete Asbestos Garage Removal, Cobham
Cobham, Surrey · Garage Removal
View this project"Graham and his guys picked up some asbestos roof sheets from my property in Chessington. Would highly recommend this company to anyone. Really good service and very professional. Thank you"
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
HSE Licensed Removal
Higher-risk material handled under full enclosure, with the 14 days of HSE notice the law requires and independent clearance testing.
Planning Aware
Used to conservation areas and listed buildings: scaffold and access planned around the restrictions, original fabric protected.
Fully Licensed
Licensed asbestos removal contractor (Licence No. 142305706). Full public liability insurance on every job.
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.