Asbestos Roofing Removal in Wimbledon

Walk down the hill from the Village and the gardens get deeper. The Georgian and early Victorian houses around the green sit in their own world up top, but drop into the denser town that grew once the railway arrived and the picture changes. The Victorian and Edwardian houses around the centre and Wimbledon Park have had things added to the back over the years, a kitchen extension here, a utility lean-to there, a workshop or store run along the boundary. A fair number of those add-ons were roofed in corrugated cement, and a lot of it is still up there now, going grey and brittle.

This is the work that sits beyond the lock-up garage. We are talking about the flat-roof extension behind a terrace, the lean-to against a side return, the outbuilding at the bottom of a larger plot, and the higher cement roofs you find on the bigger detached and semi-detached houses towards Raynes Park. The plots down here are deep enough that a second structure at the end of the garden is common, and the older ones nearly always carry a cement roof. Most of it went up before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, which is the simple reason it keeps turning up.

Graham runs these jobs himself out of Chessington, just down the road, so the person who looks at your roof is the person who does the work. No middle layer, no passing it on. That matters on a roof, because the right call about whether a sheet comes off whole or needs more care is one made by someone who has done it a hundred times, not by an office. Chessington is only a few miles south, so getting out to look at a roof in Wimbledon is a short run rather than a half-day trek, and that keeps things quick when a sheet has already started to go.

The aim is to lift the material off in one piece, not to break it up. We unfasten the sheets, lift them down whole, wrap and seal them, and load them for licensed disposal. Soffits, fascia boards and cement gutters come off in the same controlled way, worked loose by hand rather than cut. Keeping everything intact is what stops fibres getting loose, so there is no cutting or smashing on site if it can be avoided, and what does come down is double-wrapped before it leaves the garden.

Much of this is non-licensed cement work, which keeps it straightforward and usually means the job is done and cleared inside a day or two. Where a job involves higher-risk material or a larger, more enclosed structure that tips it into licensed work, the rules step up. That means 14 days of notice to the HSE before we start, full enclosure of the area, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before the space is handed back. We tell you up front which side of that line your job falls on, so there are no surprises on price or timing once we have seen the roof.

Once the old roof is off, the gap gets filled. On an extension or outbuilding that usually means galvanised steel box-profile sheets, three-layer torch-on felt for a flat roof, a tiled finish to match the house, or modern asbestos-free fibre cement that looks like the original without the risk. Soffits and fascias go back in uPVC or a clean board, and the gutters are renewed at the same time so the whole run is sorted in one visit. You end up with a roofline that is sound and safe to leave alone for the next few decades.