Asbestos in the UK – how the past inevitably catches up with us

Among the obituaries to Ozzy Osbourne recently, I saw a quote from him regarding the death of his father from ‘asbestos poisoning’. Perhaps working in construction and demolition makes words like this jump out to me, but it illustrates both the ubiquity of asbestos and the lack of knowledge about it.

Recently, I met my wife’s favourite cousin for the first time and found we had so much in common. Drew was brought up in Aberdeen in the 1970s and the siren song of punk lured him to London in 1977. One of the first places he visited was Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s famous boutique on Kings Road in Chelsea.

The shop had opened in 1971 as Let it Rock, selling clothing inspired by the 1950s Teddy Boy style, but by 1975 it had transformed into a hub for the emerging punk movement. The rebellious designs and the group of tearaways who worked and hung out there soon became the Sex Pistols.

Vivienne Westwood's shop at 430 King's Road, London was a hub for the 1970s punk movement. Photograph: Wikimedia / Kwh1050

My wife remembered Drew coming back to their house in one of the shop’s striking new outfits, and how awestruck she was by this act of rebellion. Over lunch we chatted and exchanged stories from back in the day and found common ground about bands, people and places. One of those stories I told him was about Malcolm McLaren.

I vividly recall reading about Malcolm’s death 15 years ago, and in particular one headline which read ‘pop impresario dies from rare form of cancer’. The thing is, mesothelioma, which was the cause of McLaren’s death, is not rare. Sadly, there were another 2,500 deaths from this terrible disease in 2010 and there have been over 60,000 deaths from mesothelioma in the last 50 years. But the point of the article was the question ‘how could a media celebrity be exposed to asbestos?’

One of the most exciting facets of punk was its DIY philosophy: you didn’t need big record companies or the establishment telling you what to do or how to do it. It was this philosophy that guided Malcolm McLaren when he decided to redesign his shop to make it look like a bomb had hit it, including tearing down the ceiling. It was while he was working on this project that his widow believed he was exposed to asbestos. Ben Westwood said his mother Vivienne “had mentioned that she’d seen asbestos there. It was board asbestos, and it was in the early seventies so there was a lot of it left, and I don’t think anyone really did anything about it.”

Stoke Newington Common festival London, 1979. Photograph: Alan Denney / Flickr

The whole story seemed to me an allegory for the misunderstandings and misinformation that surround asbestos.

In order to understand both the problem and its size, the first thing you need to know about asbestos is that it is a naturally occurring mineral. It comes from rocks, mined around the globe. During the days of empire, the most common source of asbestos imported into the UK came from mines in what are now Commonwealth countries, like Canada, Australia and South Africa. (As a result, we call brown asbestos ‘amosite’, as it came from the asbestos mines of South Africa – AMOSA).

Unlike other minerals which are crystalline, when asbestos is formed it creates a fibrous lattice. These asbestos fibres are either serpentine or amphibole. Chrysotile, or white asbestos, is the only member of the serpentine group. Of amphiboles, the two most common are amosite (brown) and crocidolite (blue). Amosite is the most common amphibole variety of asbestos found in building materials, and crocidolite the second most common.

Amosite under a microscope - it is the most common amphibole variety of asbestos found in building materials. Photograph: iStock

These asbestos fibres are incombustible – you can’t set fire to them. They are incredibly strong; as strong as steel. They are fantastic as reinforcing or binding agents, and are resistant to high temperatures, acid, alkali and biological action.
You can’t pass an electrical current through them. They absorb sound, insulate and are great for reducing condensation.

But best of all, asbestos was in plentiful supply. This made asbestos the perfect material for construction.

The commercial exploitation of asbestos started in the time leading up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond, with the development of steam-powered machinery. However, it also began to filter into many other settings, including domestic ones. This widespread use meant that the demand for asbestos was huge and industrial-scale mining of the mineral began.

It is estimated that between six and 12 million tons of raw asbestos were imported to the UK in the last century. This was turned into over 2,000 different products and used in schools, hospitals, factories, offices and homes. The very qualities that asbestos brings to construction materials are what make it such a risk to human health, and since 1987 it has been categorised as a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

When you apply force to an asbestos fibre it doesn’t snap but instead shaves off into thinner fibres, like peeling a cheese string. The smaller the fibres, the easier it is for them to be breathed in past the body’s defence mechanisms. Once in the lungs they can cause a wide variety of problems, from pleural plaques, pleural thickening, asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma.

According to the Health and Safety Executive, there were over 5,000 deaths in 2023 caused by exposure to asbestos, with 2,218 from mesothelioma, over 2,500 from asbestos-related lung cancer and another 497 from asbestosis.

Mesothelioma is an aggressive and incurable cancer that develops in the lining of the lungs, abdomen or heart, often because of asbestos exposure. Many people diagnosed with mesothelioma were unknowingly exposed to asbestos in their workplaces decades ago, and the disease can take years to develop. Mesothelioma UK works to provide specialist support, campaign for better treatment and awareness, and ensure that those diagnosed receive the best possible care.

The layer on sprayed-on asbestos is soft enough to be loosened merely by scratching. Photograph: UKATA

Public awareness of the hazards of asbestos can be dated to the period immediately following the death of Nellie Kershaw, aged 33, in 1924. She had worked during the previous seven years in a textile factory spinning asbestos fibre into yarn. She died of severe fibrosis of the lungs. The pathologist, William Cooke, who found the retained asbestos fibres in her lungs, called the cause of death asbestosis.

Nellie Kershaw was not the first case to be reported of lung fibrosis caused by asbestos. In 1899, Montague Murray had reported the case of another 33-year-old, this time a man who had worked for 14 years in an asbestos textile factory. When he had died, Murray found asbestos scarring in his lungs. The patient had previously told Murray he was the only survivor from 10 others who had worked in his workshop. However, unlike the Montague Murray case, which had aroused little interest, the death of Nellie Kershaw and its cause was widely reported, as her photograph had been used in adverts for the company.

I am often asked why, if we knew about the dangers of asbestos, we didn’t do something about it sooner.

Sadly, in 1899 the life expectancy of a working man was only 44, so an early death wasn’t uncommon. By 1969 however, when the UK introduced the first set of regulations addressing the use and removal of asbestos products, life expectancy had increased to 67.9 years. Diseases which could halve life expectancy were therefore far more impactful. Of course, there was also concerted pressure and subterfuge from some companies mining, importing and manufacturing asbestos goods – check out the BBC podcast Assume Nothing – Killer Dust for an insight into the lengths one company went to in order to continue making dangerous products and to protect their profits.

In the meantime, asbestos had been put to thousands of uses, nowhere more so than in construction – whether that was roofs, rainwater goods, external cladding, ceilings, walls and doors, floors, everyday items and pretty much anywhere else. Some typical examples where it was used, primarily for heat or fire resistance, include sprayed coating, asbestos insulating boards and cement products.

Sprayed-on asbestos, commonly called flock or limpet, consists of a loose bond of asbestos fibres and/or artificial mineral fibres mixed with water and/or an adhesive, which is sprayed on under pressure. After it dries, a layer forms soft enough to be loosened merely by scratching. This layer, only a few centimetres thick, can be destroyed by pressure or mere touch, losing its cohesion, and very quickly releasing fibres. For this reason, sprayed-on asbestos is considered a particularly dangerous health hazard.

Asbestos insulation board, often referred to as AIB, is different from sprayed-on asbestos in that it is thicker and contains more adhesive. For this reason, it is more stable than sprayed-on asbestos but can be scratched open merely with a fingernail and therefore is very dangerous. AIB was primarily used in construction to protect against fire, for example, in boiler rooms, factories, and in switch panels in electric installations. It can be found under windowsills in residential construction, lining fire escapes, lift shafts and affixed to or sandwiched inside fire doors.

Asbestos cement panels were first patented in 1900 under the clever name of Eternit. Originally, the idea was to replace traditional roof tiles with asbestos cement panels, since an Eternit roof weighed only a fifth the weight of a traditional tile roof. But it was soon discovered that asbestos cement panels could be a construction material in their own right, for use as a wall covering, corrugated roofing, flooring and for the production of prefab parts. The unique advantages of this new construction material were that it was fireproof, had good acoustic properties, held up to the weather and could be handled easily because it was light. Moulded asbestos cement pipes were especially suitable for drinking water and sewer pipes.

It wasn’t until 1999 that we saw the full ban of all asbestos, including white chrysotile asbestos. (Thus, any building built after 2000 legally shouldn’t contain asbestos – however, people do break the law and vigilance is still required.) We now have the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012, and these include some vital steps to protect you.

Regulation 4 requires the controllers of all non-domestic premises to manage any asbestos-containing materials on those premises. In most cases this will mean that an asbestos management plan should be drawn up and the significant findings shared with anybody working on the premises.

Regulation 10 requires that any employee be given adequate information, instruction, and training where that employee is, or is liable to be, exposed to asbestos. This is where UKATA steps in.

UKATA – the UK Asbestos Training Association – was set up in 2008 and is committed to promoting excellence in asbestos training through the development and implementation of high-quality training standards, the provision of best practice guidance and the promotion of safe and responsible working practices within the asbestos industry. UKATA maintains a register of approved training providers and ensures compliance through a robust process of verification and auditing, giving confidence that training delivered under the UKATA banner meets the highest standards of quality and consistency.

Whether it is for persons working with asbestos, managers of commercial buildings, groundworkers, or waste site operators – making sure that people are correctly informed about asbestos will sadly remain vital in the coming years.

Knowledge is power. It is impossible to know whether Malcolm would have attacked the asbestos materials in his Kings Road shop with such abandon had he been aware they were asbestos, but during his short illness he fought hard to survive, and I am certain he would have wanted to be around to watch the Pistols still performing and to see what else his legacy has created.

Chris Ivey is a director of UKATA and health and safety consultant director at THSP. For more information see:
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