Asbestos Roofing Removal in Epsom

Walk the back gardens of Epsom and you start to notice the roofs nobody thinks about. The long cement sheet over a workshop behind a Woodcote house. The lean-to bolted onto the back of a 1930s semi near Stamford Green. The flat-roof extension that went up in the postwar years and has been quietly leaking ever since. These are the roofs that get a coat of bitumen paint every few years and otherwise go ignored, and a great many of them are corrugated asbestos cement.

Epsom built a lot of this. The town spread fast between the wars, street after street of semis out towards Ewell and across the Wells Estate, and the decades that followed filled the gardens behind them with sheds, outbuildings, garden rooms and tacked-on extensions. Cement sheet was cheap, light and fireproof, so it went on almost everything that needed a roof. Bigger plots took bigger roofs, and a single long-span workshop or a run of stables behind one of the older Woodcote houses can carry far more material than a small shed ever would. None of it was banned until 1999, which means the larger roofs on older Epsom properties, the ones nobody has touched in thirty years, are exactly where it tends to survive.

This page is about those larger roofs and the cement trim that comes with them. The lock-up garage is its own job. Here we are dealing with the roofs over extensions, outbuildings and lean-tos, and with the soffits, gutters and fascia boards that finish off the interwar housing all over the town. They are easy to overlook precisely because they work, and a roof that has kept the rain out for half a century rarely gets a second look until someone decides to extend, knock through or finally clear the garden. That is usually the moment the asbestos question lands.

The aim on any cement roof is to keep the sheets whole. We unbolt and lift each one in one piece wherever the sheet has held together, rather than breaking it up, because an intact sheet keeps its fibres locked in and the work stays controlled. The fixings are eased out rather than snapped, the sheet is lowered down by hand, then it is wrapped, labelled and run straight to a licensed disposal facility. On a bigger extension or outbuilding roof we will often work off a scaffold or a tower rather than ladders, since the height and the span are part of what makes these jobs different from a single garage. A long workshop roof can hold dozens of sheets, and getting them all down clean takes proper access and a bit of planning rather than brute force.

The cement soffits, fascia boards and gutters on the interwar semis come off the same careful way. They are smaller pieces but they sit high under the eaves, they snap easily, and they are right above where people walk, so they are handled with the same care as the roof itself. We clear the ground below first, keep the work area damped down, and bag the offcuts as we go rather than letting them build up.

With the asbestos gone and the area checked clear, we can fit a replacement to suit the building and the budget. Galvanised steel box-profile is the usual choice for a workshop or a larger outbuilding, and it goes on quickly once the old roof is off. A three-layer torch-on felt or a new flat roof suits an extension, a tiled roof can match the house, and asbestos-free fibre cement gives you the old look without the risk. Sound surfaces that you would rather keep can be boxed out instead of stripped, which is sometimes the sensible call on a roof that is still doing its job.