Asbestos Artex and Textured Coating Removal in Guildford

Textured coating is the swirled, stippled or combed finish on ceilings in almost every house decorated between the 1960s and the 1990s. Artex is a brand name that became the word for all of it, in the same way people say Hoover.

It is the asbestos material we get asked about more than any other inside a house, and it is the one where the right answer is most often not removal.

Recognising it

You are looking for pattern rather than material. A stipple across the whole ceiling, sometimes with a swirled fan around the light fitting, occasionally a combed or broken-leather pattern applied with a comb or a rubber stipple. Walls got it too, particularly in hallways and above dado rails.

Age is what matters. Coatings from the 1960s to the mid 1980s frequently contained chrysotile, white asbestos, at a low percentage. The material was banned in 1999, so anything applied after that is clear.

Paint does not help you. Most of these ceilings have been painted three or four times since, and the coating underneath is unchanged. Nor does the pattern itself: the same patterns were produced in asbestos-free formulations for years, using the same tools.

The only certainty is a sample and a lab test. An asbestos survey is £200 to £400 and a single sample and test costs less, which on a material this common is usually the sensible first step before anyone quotes anything.

What it costs, and the choice that actually matters

A 20 square metre ceiling is £2,750 to £6,000 to remove. That number surprises people and it is worth explaining rather than defending.

The cost is not the material. It is containment and labour. Removal means sealing the room, protecting or removing everything in it, working overhead with the material kept wet, bagging the arisings, and then cleaning the space to a standard where it is safe to hand back. That is days rather than hours, and it is skilled, unpleasant work.

Set against that, sealing the same ceiling is around £30 per square metre. On 20 square metres that is a few hundred pounds rather than a few thousand.

So the real question is almost never how cheaply the artex can be removed. It is whether it needs to be removed at all.

Three options, honestly compared

Leave it. A sound textured ceiling that nobody is drilling is low risk. There is no legal duty on a homeowner to remove asbestos from their own house. This is a legitimate answer and a lot of the time it is the right one. It stops being right when the ceiling is damaged, water stained or coming loose, or when work is about to happen that will disturb it.

Seal or overboard it. Encapsulation at around £30 per square metre, or plasterboard fixed over the top and skimmed. Both leave you a flat ceiling to decorate and both cost a fraction of removal. Overboarding needs care about the fixings, because screwing through the coating is a disturbance in itself and wants the same controls as any drilling. Neither option suits a ceiling that has already failed.

Remove it. The right answer when the ceiling has to come out anyway, when there is damage or water ingress, when a loft conversion or a rewire means the ceiling is coming down regardless, or when you simply want the material gone and have decided it is worth the money. It is the most expensive route and the only one that ends with the material off site.

We will tell you which of the three we think applies. There is more money in removal, and saying so in writing is the point.

Licensing, and where the line sits

This is one of the materials where the classification depends on the method as much as the substance.

HSE treats work on small areas of textured coating using dust-reducing methods as non-licensed work. Drilling and boring through it, and cleaning up debris from a collapsed section, have their own guidance and sit in the same category.

Large-scale removal using steaming or gelling is notifiable non-licensed work. It does not need a licence, but it does have to be reported to HSE before it starts, with the medical surveillance and record keeping that goes with notifiable work.

What is never acceptable, at any scale, is dry sanding or dry scraping. That is how a low-percentage chrysotile coating becomes a serious airborne exposure, and it is what makes an old ceiling dangerous when it was not dangerous the day before.

What happens on the day

The room is emptied or everything in it is sealed and protected. Floors, doorways and any fixed furniture are covered. Where the job is large enough, the room is enclosed and put under controlled conditions.

The coating is softened, usually with steam, and taken off wet. Wet material does not make dust, which is the whole principle. It comes off in a sludge rather than in flakes, straight into bags rather than onto the floor covering.

Then the clean, which takes longer than people expect and is the part that determines whether the room is genuinely safe afterwards. Surfaces are wiped and vacuumed with a filtered machine, the sheeting is removed inward and bagged, and the space is checked before it is handed back.

You get a hazardous waste consignment note. The ceiling above you is bare plasterboard or lath, damp, and ready for a plasterer.

Walls, not just ceilings

Textured coating went on walls as well, and wall artex behaves differently enough to be worth its own paragraph.

It turns up most in hallways and stairwells, often above a dado rail, and in bathrooms where a textured finish was thought to be practical. Sometimes the whole wall, sometimes a single feature chimney breast.

Two things make walls harder than ceilings. They get knocked. A hallway wall takes bags, buggies, bicycles and furniture, so damage is far more common than on a ceiling nobody touches. And they get drilled. Every shelf, radiator bracket, handrail, mirror and picture hook is a hole through the coating, which is exactly the activity HSE has specific guidance for.

The practical result is that wall coatings are more often already damaged when we see them, and damaged coating is the case where removal moves from optional to sensible.

What happens if it has already been disturbed

People sometimes ring after the fact. A ceiling has been sanded before anyone thought about it, or a section came down when a pipe leaked, or a builder went through it with a multi-tool.

The honest position is that a single short exposure is a very different thing from the repeated, prolonged exposure that causes disease decades later, and worrying about one afternoon is understandable but rarely proportionate. What matters is what happens next.

Stop disturbing it. Close the room off rather than sweeping or hoovering, because a domestic vacuum puts fibres straight back into the air through the exhaust. Leave the debris where it is. Then get the material identified, because the response to a confirmed asbestos coating and a confirmed asbestos-free one are entirely different, and until the test comes back nobody knows which situation you are in.

Debris from a collapsed textured coating has its own HSE task sheet and is non-licensed work with the right controls. It is not an emergency, and it is also not something to tidy up with a dustpan.

Guildford ceilings

Textured coating is the most evenly spread asbestos material in the town, because it followed decorating fashion rather than building type.

The 1930s to 1970s suburban stock at Burpham, Merrow, Onslow Village and Westborough is full of it, usually applied in the 1970s over ceilings that were already forty years old. The post-war council housing at Park Barn, Bellfields and Stoughton has it too, often applied at the same time across whole blocks by the same contractor, which is why one neighbour's test result is genuinely useful information for the rest of the row.

Even the Victorian and Edwardian terraces closer to the centre have it, because a lath and plaster ceiling that had started to crack was a very common candidate for texturing rather than replacing.

The one pattern worth knowing locally: houses that have had a loft conversion or a rewire since the 1990s often had the ceilings replaced at the same time, so a period property is not automatically a problem. It depends entirely on what has been done to it since.

One more local point. Because texturing was often done street by street by the same decorator in the same year, a test result from a neighbour is genuinely informative. It is not proof, and it would not satisfy a surveyor, but it is a useful steer on whether to spend on a test at all. If three houses in your row have come back positive, yours is unlikely to be the exception.

We cover Guildford and the towns around it, and each has its own page with the local detail on the areas we cover hub.