Asbestos Surveys in Richmond

A survey is not removal. It is the step before, the part where we go through a property and work out what asbestos is present, where it sits, and what condition it is in. In Richmond that usually means a mix of ages under one roof. A Georgian terrace near the Green might have later additions tucked behind it. A riverside Victorian house might have had a 1970s kitchen or boiler cupboard fitted into older fabric. The asbestos is rarely where the building is grandest. It hides in the practical corners.

The common finds across the town are familiar enough. Corrugated cement on a garage or shed roof. Textured artex on ceilings and walls. Asbestos insulating board around a boiler or built into a conversion. Vinyl or thermoplastic floor tiles with black bitumen adhesive underneath. Pipe lagging in the cellars of the older properties, and cement soffits and gutters on the interwar semis out towards Kew and East Sheen. None of it can be identified by eye with any certainty, which is the whole reason a survey exists.

We take small samples of anything suspect under controlled conditions and send them to a UKAS-accredited laboratory. The lab confirms whether asbestos is present and which type, because the type changes what happens next. What you get back is a written report you can act on, not a guess and not a verbal reassurance over a doorstep. Results come back within a few working days, and we go through them with you so the report is a tool you can use rather than a document that sits in a drawer.

Large parts of Richmond are conservation areas, and many of the Georgian and Victorian houses are listed. That changes how a refurbishment and demolition survey reads, because the building work it sits in front of is itself constrained. You cannot simply strip a listed interior back to find out what is behind it. Original cornices, panelling and joinery have to be protected, which means the survey has to be planned with the same care as the work, identifying what is there without tearing into protected fabric to do it.

It also shapes the practical side. On these streets, scaffold and access get planned around the planning restrictions. Parking and skip permits are not a given. Some streets need notification before work begins. The removal itself, when it eventually happens, is our job, but on a listed or conservation-area property it almost never happens in isolation. It is one strand of a wider project that may involve listed building consent or conservation-area conditions, and the survey is what lets everyone, the architect, the builder, the conservation officer, work from the same facts. Booking it early matters too, because access on these streets has to be arranged in advance rather than turned up for on the day.

That is why the written report carries real weight on a Richmond house. It is the document a builder prices against, a solicitor files, and a buyer reads before they commit. Get the survey wrong on a property like this and the cost is not just money, it is unpicking work that touched fabric it should not have. On a protected house the order of events is fixed. You survey, you plan around what the survey found, and only then does anyone start opening things up.