Asbestos Garage Removal in Wandsworth

Wandsworth is mostly terraces, mansion flats and conversions, so the corrugated cement garage is not the first thing people picture in SW18. Look a little harder and they are there. Behind the larger period houses off Trinity Road and on the slopes above East Hill you find detached and semi-detached homes with a side return wide enough for a garage, and a good number of those went up with a cement-sheet roof. The postwar plots and council-built streets running off Garratt Lane added their own, and the gardens backing onto Wandsworth Common hold sheds and lean-to stores with the same grey ribbed sheeting. The older industrial fringe down towards the Wandle, where workshops and yards were once squeezed between the houses, left a fair scattering of cement-roofed stores and lock-ups that are still standing today.

Most of them date from somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s. That was the cheap, quick roof of its day, light enough to throw up over a single garage or a garden shed in an afternoon, and nobody thought twice about what was in it. The sheets are usually asbestos cement, asbestos fibres bound into a hard cement board, and as long as they are whole and painted they sit there doing no harm. You will see the same material on the underside as flat soffit boards, on a small store as a one-piece flat panel, and sometimes lining the inside of the garage walls as well as covering the roof.

The trouble is age. A roof fitted in 1965 has had sixty winters on it. The surface goes chalky, moss gets a grip, the bolts rust through, and a corner cracks the first time someone leans a ladder against it. Old fixing holes weep, a gutter blocks, water sits where it should run off, and the sheet starts to break down from the edges in. Once a sheet is broken, drilled or snapped it can release fibres, and that is the point where a tired garage roof stops being someone else's problem and becomes yours. Those fibres are what cause asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, often decades after the dust was breathed in, which is exactly why a crumbling roof is worth dealing with rather than leaving.

Taking the old sheets off leaves the garage open, so most people want a new roof on the same visit. The frame underneath is often perfectly sound, timber or steel purlins that have outlasted the sheeting on top, and there are a few sensible ways to cover it again. Galvanised steel box-profile is the closest match to the original look, light and quick to fit and good for decades, and it is the option most Wandsworth garages end up with. A flat garage or a store with a shallow pitch can take three-layer torch-on felt, which gives a clean, fully bonded weatherproof finish. Where the garage sits in full view of the street or close to a period house, a flat or tiled roof can be built to sit better with the brickwork and the roofline behind it. Asbestos-free fibre cement sheets are the modern version of what came off, the same corrugated shape and feel without the asbestos, which suits anyone who wants a like-for-like replacement.

Not everything has to come down. If a garage or outbuilding has asbestos cement that is still intact, painted and weathertight, and you would rather not disturb it, boxing out is an option. The material is sealed in behind new boarding or a new outer skin so it is contained and out of harm's way, left undisturbed rather than removed. That can be the cheaper and lower-risk route when the sheeting is genuinely sound and you are not planning to demolish.

We will walk you through which option fits the garage, the look you want and the budget before anything starts, and we do not push a full replacement where a simpler fix will do. The cost depends on the size of the garage, the number of sheets and the roof you choose, and we set all of that out in a fixed written quote after a free site visit so there are no surprises once the work begins.