Asbestos Removal in Woking

Woking is one of the two or three closest towns we work in, about nine miles north of Guildford up the A320 through Jacobs Well and Mayford. In practice that means most Woking jobs get booked in the same week they are quoted.

Why there is so much of it here

Woking's asbestos story is unusually easy to date, because the town's growth is unusually well documented.

The 1944 Greater London Plan designated the area for overspill development from London, and the borough built accordingly. Council estates went up at Maybury, Barnsbury and St Mary's in Byfleet, with over a thousand houses completed by 1951 and a great deal more through the 1950s and 1960s. Sheerwater followed as a large planned neighbourhood in the same era.

That building programme lands precisely in the window when asbestos cement was the default. Garage blocks, coal stores, outside toilets, shed roofs and the flat sheet used to close in an entrance canopy. Later came the textured ceilings, applied through the 1970s across housing that was already twenty years old.

Then there is the older stock. Old Woking, Horsell, Hook Heath and Mayford have Victorian and Edwardian houses whose main buildings predate asbestos entirely, but whose garages and outbuildings were added in exactly the wrong decades. That is a pattern we see constantly: a period house with a 1960s garage bolted onto the side of it.

Woking Palace, the ruins of the royal residence used by Henry VII and Henry VIII, is a reminder of how long the town has been here. The Shah Jahan Mosque, built in 1889 as the first purpose-built mosque in Britain, and Horsell Common, where H G Wells landed his Martians, both predate the material by decades. Almost everything we work on went up between the war and 1985.

The recycling centre problem

This is the practical fact worth knowing before you plan a weekend of work.

Woking Community Recycling Centre does not accept asbestos. Nor do most Surrey sites. In the entire county only three take it: Epsom, Guildford and Shepperton.

The Guildford site, which is the nearest one for most of Woking, will take up to six sheets of asbestos cement. Before you arrive it has to be sprayed with water and double wrapped or double bagged in heavy duty polythene, sealed with tape. A van, pickup or trailer needs a van permit, the load counts against the construction and DIY waste limit, and asbestos must not be mixed with other DIY waste. You need to telephone the site first to check there is space in the container, complete a declaration form on arrival, and show evidence that you are a Surrey resident.

Six sheets is not a garage roof. A single garage is normally more than that, so for most people the tip route stops being viable at the point they measure.

Those rules do change, so check the Surrey County Council page for the current position before you put anything in a car.

Where the material is already off the building and stacked in the garden, our waste collection service is the straightforward answer.

Councils, and what is about to change

Woking Borough Council today. From 1 April 2027 the borough is abolished, along with every other Surrey district and the county council itself, and replaced by two unitary authorities. Woking joins Guildford, Surrey Heath, Waverley, Runnymede and Spelthorne in West Surrey Council. Elections were held in May 2026 and shadow councils are running now.

For an asbestos job this mostly does not matter, because removal needs no council permission. It matters if you are asking about permitted development for a garage demolition, or about building control, and it matters for knowing who to ring in eighteen months.

What we get called out for most in Woking

Garage roofs, by a distance. Corrugated cement over a detached or semi-detached garage, usually on the 1950s to 1970s estates, and usually because the owner wants a car port, a home office or simply a roof that does not leak.

Textured ceilings second, and here the conversation is usually about whether removal is necessary at all. On a sound ceiling, sealing at around £30 per square metre against £2,750 to £6,000 to strip a 20 square metre room is a large difference for the same outcome.

Then the awkward ones. Insulating board around service risers in the 1960s and 1970s flats and maisonettes, which is licensed work and goes to an HSE-licensed contractor. Soffit boards on estates where the whole row is having new guttering. Floor tiles found under a carpet during a kitchen refit.

Getting to you

The A320 is the direct route, through Jacobs Well and Mayford, and it is the one we use for most of the borough. For Sheerwater, Maybury and the eastern side, the A3 to the Wisley junction and across is often quicker in the morning.

Access is generally easier here than in central Guildford. The post-war estates were built with space for a car, which means a vehicle can usually get within reasonable distance of a garage. The exceptions are the rear garage blocks, where the only approach is a shared footpath and everything comes out by barrow.

We also cover West Byfleet, Send, Ripley, Pirbright, Worplesdon, Chertsey and Addlestone from the same base, priced the same way. The full list is on the areas we cover page, and the price ranges that apply across all of it are on the cost page.

One local timing note. The Basingstoke Canal and the railway between them cut the town into sections with limited crossings, and the two north to south routes across the main line through the centre are genuinely congested at either end of the day. For a job on the far side of the line from the A320, an early start makes a real difference to how much of the morning is spent moving rather than working.