Asbestos Roofing Removal in Wandsworth

Look up at the back of a Wandsworth terrace and the asbestos is often hiding in plain sight. SW18 is mostly terraces, conversions and flats, so the danger is not the suburban lock-up garage. It is the rear extension that someone roofed in corrugated cement in the 1960s, the lean-to greenhouse or coal store tucked against a back wall, the workshop and outbuilding behind the larger period houses off Trinity Road, and the soffits, fascia boards and gutters that run along almost every older roofline in the area.

Most of these went up while cement was the cheap, fireproof way to cover a roof or trim an eave. A flat-roof extension behind a Tonsleys terrace, a shed roof at the bottom of a garden near Wandsworth Common, the boarding that boxes in the underside of an Edwardian overhang. None of it caused anyone any trouble for decades. The trouble comes from the weather and from time, not from the material sitting still.

That slow decay is the catch. A cement roof that has done forty or fifty winters is a very different thing from a freshly cast sheet, and that is exactly the kind of roof we are called out to across Wandsworth.

The aim on any asbestos roof is to take it down in one piece. Whole sheets, whole soffit boards, whole lengths of fascia and guttering, unbolted and lowered rather than snapped, cut or smashed up on the ground. Breaking a sheet is what releases fibres, so the work is slow and deliberate. We damp the material down so the surface stays bound, release the fixings by hand instead of cutting through them, and bring each piece down intact before it is double-wrapped and taken straight to a licensed disposal site. Old roof bolts and screws are usually seized solid after decades in the weather, which is part of why this is patient work rather than a quick strip.

A flat-roof extension or a single outbuilding roof in Wandsworth is usually a one-day job, and most cement roofing falls under non-licensed asbestos work, which keeps it straightforward. We will not put any of it in a household skip, because broken cement and bin lorries do not mix, and the material has to go to a site licensed to take it. We keep the working area sheeted throughout so nothing scatters across a shared garden, a side return or a neighbour's plot on these tight back-to-back streets, and we clear up as we go rather than leaving debris behind.

Soffits, fascia and gutters are handled the same careful way. They are easy to ignore because they sit out of reach along the eaves, but they are some of the most common asbestos finds on the Victorian and Edwardian terraces around the Common and East Hill. A length of cement soffit board looks like nothing much from the pavement, yet it is the same material as a roof sheet and wants the same respect. We take it down whole, off the scaffold or tower rather than off a ladder, so it never gets snapped over a gutter edge on the way down.