Asbestos Roofing Removal in Surbiton

Surbiton is a town of villas, and villas come with outbuildings. Walk the streets around Maple Road, Claremont Road and The Crescent and behind the grand houses you find a second world of structures: garden stores, workshops, lean-tos against the back wall, flat-roof extensions tacked on in the postwar decades. A lot of these were roofed in corrugated asbestos cement, because it was cheap, light and easy to throw up over a timber frame.

The story carries on out towards Tolworth and Berrylands, where the streets of 1930s semis tell a slightly different version. Here the asbestos cement is often in the soffits, the gutters and the fascia boards that run under the eaves, as well as on shed and garage roofs at the bottom of the garden. Riverside houses along the Portsmouth Road, and the converted properties near Seething Wells, throw up their own mix of older roofing on annexes and side returns.

None of this is rare, and none of it is a reason to panic. Asbestos cement sheet was used everywhere in Britain before the 1999 ban, and Surbiton got more than its share simply because so many of its homes pre-date that date. The question is usually not whether a property has it, but where it is and what state it is in.

For most asbestos cement roofing the work is what the regulations call non-licensed, but the method still matters. The aim is to keep the sheets whole. We lift each one off intact rather than breaking it, damp it down to hold any loose fibres in place, and lower it by hand instead of dropping it. Fixings are cut or eased out rather than snapped. Broken sheets mean dust, and dust is the thing we are working to avoid.

Once down, the sheets are double-wrapped, labelled and run to a licensed disposal facility, with the paperwork to show where it went. Soffits, fascia boards and asbestos cement guttering on the interwar semis come off the same careful way, working along the eaves and bagging as we go. Access is part of the plan from the start, because a lot of this material sits at height on extensions and outbuildings rather than at ground level.

Some situations move into higher-risk licensed territory, for example sprayed coatings or certain insulating boards found tucked into older roof structures and conversions. Where that applies, the controls step up: 14 days of notice to the HSE before the work starts, a fully sealed enclosure around the area, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before anyone uses the space again. Graham will tell you at the survey which category your roof falls into, in plain terms, before any work is booked.