Asbestos Garage Removal in Sunbury

Walk the residential streets running up from Lower Sunbury towards Sunbury Cross and Kempton and you pass garage after garage. A lot of them are the same age as the interwar and postwar semis they sit beside, with a shallow-pitched roof made from corrugated cement sheets. That roofing was the cheap, quick choice for a garage or a shed from roughly the 1950s through to the 1980s, and a fair bit of it is still up there now. The older riverside plots around Thames Street tend to have it on a detached garage or a workshop at the bottom of the garden, while the postwar estates higher up the town have whole runs of near-identical garages built to the same pattern.

The trouble is what is in those grey sheets. Older corrugated cement roofing was made with asbestos fibres bound into the cement, which was a normal building material at the time and only stopped once the UK banned asbestos in 1999. Left whole and painted it sits there causing nobody any bother, and a sound sheet is low risk while the fibres stay locked in the cement. Once it starts to crack, flake or shed grit into the gutter, those fibres can work loose, and that is the point where a tired garage roof in Sunbury turns into something worth dealing with properly. Years of frost, sun and Thames-valley damp do that work slowly, so a roof that looked fine ten years ago can be soft and crumbling now.

Graham, who runs Clearaway, handles these garage jobs himself rather than sending a crew. He is based over in Chessington, a short enough run across to TW16, so a Sunbury garage roof is well within his patch and he can come and look at one without it being a major expedition.

Garages in Sunbury sit on all sorts of plots. Some are detached at the end of a driveway near Sunbury Cross, some are tucked tight between two houses on the postwar estates, and a few of the larger riverside properties down by Thames Street that have been split into flats share an access that several households use. A pile of broken asbestos sheeting blocking that sort of access would be a real nuisance, and on a shared drive it would hold up the neighbours too.

Because the sheets come down whole and get wrapped on the spot, there is no need for a skip parked across your drive or out on the road. The wrapped sheets are loaded straight onto the van and taken away to a licensed disposal facility, which keeps the working area tidy and the access usable while the job runs. There is no demolition rubble left behind and no broken cement to sweep up, just a stripped timber frame ready for its new roof. For a single garage that whole process, strip and clear in one go, is a one-visit job.

For the small number of higher-risk licensed jobs, the standard steps up a long way. That work needs 14 days of notice given to the HSE before it starts, a full enclosure built and sealed around the area, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before the space is handed back. A weathered single-garage roof rarely needs all that, but if a sample comes back saying the material sits in the higher-risk bracket, that is exactly how it gets done and there are no shortcuts around it.