Asbestos Roofing Removal in Guildford

Drive through Merrow or Burpham and the front of a 1930s semi tells you very little. The asbestos is round the back. There is the lean-to off the kitchen, the brick outbuilding at the bottom of the garden, the flat-roof extension someone added in the 1970s, and the workshop or store that came with the larger period houses up towards Stoughton. A good number of those still have corrugated cement roof sheets, and on the older semis the soffits and gutter runs are cement too.

This is broader than a single garage roof. A rear extension can run the full width of the house. An outbuilding behind one of the bigger Charlotteville or Stoughton properties might have a roof two or three times the area of a lock-up. The villages towards the Hog's Back, Shalford and Albury, throw up converted barns and cottage stores where the same cement sheeting covered a large span cheaply. None of it looks dangerous from the garden. Left alone and in one piece it usually is not. The problem is what the weather has been doing to it.

Guildford has a lot of rented houses and student lets, so plenty of these roofs sit over properties where no owner has been up a ladder in years. That is often how a cracked sheet goes unnoticed until a survey or a sale brings it to light.

The aim is to take the sheets down whole. They are unbolted and lifted off in one piece rather than broken up, then wrapped and double-bagged on site and taken away as the controlled waste it is. Keeping each sheet intact is the thing that keeps fibres out of the air, so the work is slow and deliberate, not a tear-off. Soffits, fascia boards and cement gutters come away the same careful way.

Much of this is non-licensed work, since weathered cement sheet on an outbuilding or extension often falls below the threshold that needs a licence. Where the material or the condition pushes it into higher-risk territory, the proper controls apply. For licensed work that means 14 days notice to the HSE before anyone starts, a full sealed enclosure around the area, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before the space is handed back. Samples go to a UKAS-accredited laboratory so there is no guessing about what is up there. Clearaway is based in Chessington and the owner Graham runs the Guildford jobs himself, so the person quoting the work is the person doing it.

With the old roof gone there is a clean deck to work from. Box-profile galvanised steel is the usual replacement on a workshop, store or outbuilding, light and quick to fit. A flat extension roof can take three-layer torch-on felt, and a pitched roof can be re-covered in tile or in asbestos-free fibre cement that matches the look without the material. New soffits and fascia in uPVC or timber finish the edge. The point is that the property is left properly roofed, not just stripped.