Asbestos Garage Removal in Twickenham

Walk the side returns and back lanes behind the interwar semis in Whitton, or the older terraces down towards St Margarets, and the same structure keeps appearing. A single brick lock-up garage with a low-pitched corrugated roof, put up to shelter a car and now holding bikes, a freezer and the overflow from the house. Thousands of these went up across the TW1 and TW2 postcodes from the 1950s onward, and the cheap, fireproof sheeting fitted to the roofs of that era was almost always asbestos cement.

Those roofs have sat through every Thames winter since. The sheets go brittle, the surface frets, moss works into the corrugations and the fixings rust through. A garage roof that looked solid for forty years starts to crack and flake along the edges, and that is the point a harmless building material turns into a real problem. Broken cement sheeting gives off fibres, and those fibres are what cause asbestosis and mesothelioma decades down the line. Left whole and painted it sits there doing nothing. It is the cracking, the drilling and the well-meant attempt to clean or re-cover it that does the damage.

Clearaway Asbestos takes these roofs down for Twickenham homeowners most weeks. We are based just along the road and have worked across the TW postcodes for more than seven years, so a weathered garage roof in Strawberry Hill or Whitton is about as familiar a job as we get. The pattern barely changes from one street to the next, which is exactly why we can give a straight answer on the day rather than guessing. A roof that has been patched with bitumen or a stray modern sheet still tends to have the original cement underneath, so the age of the garage tells us more than the look of it does.

Taking the asbestos off is only half of what most people want. A garage with no roof is no use, so once the cement sheets are gone we can fit a replacement that suits how you actually use the building. The common choice is galvanised steel box-profile, which is light, quick to fit and a close match for the original corrugated look without the asbestos. For a garage that is back to storing a car and little else, it is usually all the roof you need.

There are other routes depending on the garage and the budget. Three-layer torch-on felt gives a solid flat covering and suits a garage with a shallow or flat roof. A pitched roof can be finished flat or tiled to sit better against the house, which is worth considering on the more visible frontages around Strawberry Hill. Asbestos-free fibre cement is there if you want to keep the same style of sheet the garage was built with. We talk through what fits the structure before any work starts rather than fitting the same thing to every job.

Not every roof has to come off. If the sheeting is still sound and you would rather contain it than remove it, boxing out is an option, sealing the asbestos in behind a new layer so the fibres stay put. It is usually the cheaper way to deal with a garage roof that is not yet failing, and it can buy a sound roof several more years. Where the sheets are already cracked and shedding, though, removal is the honest answer, and we will say so rather than sell you a cover-up that fails next winter. Whichever way you go, the roof is left watertight and ready to use before we hand the garage back.