Asbestos Garage Removal in Teddington

Walk the streets off the High Street and Broad Street in Teddington and the houses tell you their age before you reach the front door. Victorian and Edwardian terraces, larger period villas towards Bushy Park and the river, rows of 1930s semis further out, and a good number of the bigger houses now split into flats. A lot of these homes gained a garage or a lock-up at some point, often tucked down the side return, behind the house, or at the end of a shared drive. For decades the cheapest way to roof one was corrugated cement sheet, and that is what went on.

That sheet is the classic find in this part of Richmond upon Thames. It was fitted roughly between the 1950s and the 1980s, screwed down over a timber or light steel frame, and most of it is still up there today. The grey, wavy panels you can spot from an upstairs window, or looking across the side streets near Bushy Park, are almost always the same product. While the sheet is whole and painted it sits there quietly and causes nobody any bother. The trouble starts when it does not.

Graham, who owns Clearaway and runs local jobs himself from nearby Chessington, has taken the same roof off garage after garage across Teddington and Hampton Wick. It is not glamorous work. It is just the thing most owners forget about until they come to sell, want to convert the garage into a room or a home office, or notice the sheets going soft and chalky overhead. By then it has usually been ignored for years, which is exactly when it is worth dealing with properly.

A standard single garage in Teddington carries somewhere around ten to fourteen corrugated sheets, each panel usually a couple of metres long. We take them down whole rather than breaking them, backing off the fixings by hand, lifting each sheet off the frame, wrapping it, and lowering it to the ground in one piece so nothing snaps and no dust is thrown up. Keeping the sheets intact is the single biggest thing that keeps a job clean, and it is the part a rushed weekend job almost always gets wrong.

Most single garages are a one-day job, often a matter of a few hours on the roof itself once we are set up. We turn up, strip the roof, double-wrap the sheets in heavy-duty sheeting, and clear the lot the same day. There is usually no skip, which matters on the tighter streets and shared drives off Waldegrave Road and around Hampton Wick where there is nowhere to put one anyway. The drive and the road stay clear, your neighbours are not blocked in, and the material leaves with us in covered transport to a licensed disposal facility with the right paperwork.

Once the asbestos is gone the garage needs a new roof, and you have options. Galvanised steel box-profile is the quick, hard-wearing like-for-like replacement and the one most people choose. A three-layer torch-on felt roof suits a flatter pitch. Some owners go for a tiled or flat roof to match the house, especially on the period properties near the river, or modern asbestos-free fibre cement that looks much like the original without the fibres inside. Where there are old cement panels boxing in a soffit, a beam or the underside of an eaves, those can be taken out and boxed back fresh at the same time, so the whole structure is sound when we leave.