Asbestos Roofing Removal in Woking

Look up around the back of a Woking house and the asbestos is usually overhead before it is anywhere else. As the town spread out from its railway station after 1838, and then filled in hard through the interwar and postwar decades, cement sheet became the default for anything that needed a cheap, weatherproof lid. Rear extensions, lean-tos, workshops, stables turned into stores, the long low outbuildings behind the bigger houses near Old Woking, all of it tended to get a corrugated cement roof. The same material went up as soffits, fascia boards and gutters on the rows of semis across Knaphill and St John's.

Most of that work was done well before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, so a roof that has sat there for fifty or sixty years is no surprise at all. The GU21 and GU22 housing is full of it. It is not the only place the material hides, but it is the most exposed, the most weathered and the one homeowners notice first, usually because a sheet has cracked or a soffit has started to crumble at the edge.

The pattern holds wherever you go in the town. The Victorian and Edwardian streets around Horsell and Old Woking carry their share on the structures behind the main house, the rear additions and the garden buildings. The big interwar and postwar estates out towards Knaphill, St John's, Goldsworth Park and Sheerwater add their own, in the soffit and fascia runs along the eaves and on the roofs of anything built to one side of the property. Roofs like these were meant to last a few decades, not the better part of a century, and a good many are now well past the point where the cement was holding everything together.

We work from the principle that the sheets should leave the property in one piece. Breaking them on site is what fills the air with fibres, so wherever a sheet is still sound we lift it off whole, lower it down rather than dropping it, and wrap it for disposal at a licensed facility. Soffits, fascias and cement guttering come off the same controlled way, run by run, not torn off and skipped. The aim throughout is to keep the dust down and the working area contained, so the rest of the house and the gardens either side are not left with anything to breathe in.

Nothing comes off the roof until we know what it is. Two grey sheets that look identical can test completely differently, so anything suspect is sampled and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory first, with results back in a few working days. A larger extension or outbuilding roof takes longer than a single small structure, simply because there is more to lift, lower and wrap, but the method does not change with the size of the job, only the time on site. We would rather take the extra hours and keep every sheet intact than rush it and crack one.

With the asbestos gone and the area checked over, we can put a new roof on to suit the building. Galvanised steel box-profile is the usual like-for-like swap on a workshop or outbuilding, three-layer torch-on felt suits a flat-roof extension, and there is the option of a tiled finish or asbestos-free fibre cement where you want it to match the house. Soffits and fascias can be reinstated in a modern, fibre-free board once the old runs are out. Boxing out is there as well if a soffit run is better covered and sealed than fully replaced.