Asbestos Surveys in Croydon

Thornton Heath, South Norwood and Selhurst hold street after street of converted Victorian houses let room by room. That makes them some of the busiest HMO patches in the borough, and it puts a particular weight on knowing where asbestos is. A house split into lettings has had decades of partition walls, boxed-in pipes, re-boarded ceilings and patched-up bathrooms, and any of that work could have moved asbestos around or covered it over.

For a landlord, a management survey is the sensible baseline. It tells you what is present, where, and whether it is sound enough to be left alone and monitored. The report is something you can keep on file and show, and it stops a small job, a new tenant fit-out or a repair, turning into an accidental disturbance because nobody knew what was behind the wall.

Where the house in question is older terraced stock, the usual suspects are textured artex on ceilings, cement soffits and downpipes outside, and floor tiles with black bitumen adhesive under later coverings. In the postwar towers and estates the picture shifts towards asbestos insulating board, ceiling panels and pipe lagging. A survey is the only way to map which of those a specific property actually has.

A clear report is just as useful as one that finds something, because it lets work go ahead without guesswork. Where asbestos does turn up, the report sets out whether it can be managed in place or needs removal, and how that removal would run. Plenty of what gets found, artex or floor tiles in good order, can be dealt with as lower-risk non-licensed work and handled quickly.

The higher-risk materials, insulating board and lagging of the kind common in the postwar blocks, are licensed work and run very differently. That means HSE notice of 14 days before the job, a full enclosure built around the area, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before the space is handed back. The survey is what tells us early which category a property falls into, so there are no surprises later. Clearaway is based in Chessington and the owner Graham runs Croydon jobs himself, so the person who reads your report is the person who would do the work.

Clearaway holds Spectra licence number 142305706 and has spent more than seven years working across this part of south London, so the survey reflects what the local housing actually throws up rather than a tick-box exercise. To book a management or a refurbishment and demolition survey on a Croydon property, call 0800 024 6168.