Asbestos Roofing Removal in Sutton

Sutton was a small Surrey village until the railway came through in 1847, and the streets that followed tell you where the asbestos went. The town spread through the Edwardian years and then filled in hard between the wars, so a lot of the housing is interwar semi-detached. Owners added to those houses for decades afterwards. A lean-to off the kitchen, a workshop at the bottom of the garden, a flat-roof extension across the back, a long run of outbuildings behind the larger houses near the centre and around Carshalton's village core. A good share of those add-ons were roofed in corrugated cement sheet, because it was cheap and it kept the rain out.

That is the work this page is about. Not the lock-up garage, which we cover separately, but the wider spread of cement roofing on extensions, sheds, lean-tos and outbuildings, plus the cement soffits, gutters and fascia boards that run along the eaves of so many of the semis in Cheam, Carshalton and Worcester Park. The same patterns turn up in Belmont and on the higher ground towards Banstead, where the postwar estates went up on the same plan.

Most of these roofs went on between the 1950s and the 1980s and have weathered ever since. By now the sheets are brittle, the surface is breaking down and the bolts are rusting through. The colour has usually faded to a dull grey and a green film of moss has taken over the lower courses. That is the point at which they start to matter, and the point at which people usually call. Often it is a leak, or a buyer's survey flagging the material, or simply a roof that has finally given up and needs replacing.

The aim on every roof is to take the sheets off whole. Cement asbestos is far safer handled in one piece than broken up, so we lift each sheet down intact rather than smashing it, wet it to keep dust down, and wrap and seal it for licensed disposal. No grinding, no snapping, no sweeping debris off the roof into the garden. The fixings come out by hand, the sheets come off in order, and the area below stays clear of fragments.

Much of this is lower-risk cement work that does not need a licence, and on a single extension or outbuilding it often runs inside a day. We tell you which category your roof falls into before we start, because it changes how the job is set up. Where the material is higher risk and the work is licensed, the controls are far heavier. That means 14 days of notice to the HSE before we begin, a full enclosure around the work, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before the space is handed back. Most domestic cement roofs do not reach that threshold, but soffits, fascias and anything friable can, and we would rather check than assume. Disposal is part of the price either way. The wrapped sheets go to a licensed waste site with the paperwork to match, so there is nothing left in the garden afterwards. On a larger run of roofing we work out access first, whether that needs a tower or a scaffold along the eaves, because reaching a two-storey rear extension safely is a different job from a low lean-to.

Once the old roof is off, you have an open structure to cover. The usual replacements are galvanised steel box-profile, which is light and quick, three-layer torch-on felt for a flat roof, or an asbestos-free fibre cement sheet that keeps the look of the original. A flat or tiled roof works where the structure suits it. We can talk through what fits the building and the budget rather than putting the same thing on every roof, and we can box out exposed timber or pipework where it makes sense to finish the job properly.