The lonely house that named the postcode
In 1827 a Scots silk and wine merchant called William Sanderson bought a plot of the old Penge Common and put up the first house on it, well clear of anything else. He named it after a Borders word he grew up with, “anerly”, which means lonely or only. The name stuck to the road, then to the station, then to the whole patch of SE20 you now know as Anerley. We clean a fair amount of it. So this page is the honest version of what an end of tenancy clean here actually involves, what your deposit hinges on, and what we charge.
Here is the short answer for anyone in a hurry. We do full end of tenancy cleans across Anerley and the rest of SE20 from £156 for a studio, against a 57-point agent-approved checklist, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee if the inventory clerk flags anything. Most of the rest of this page is detail and local small print.
Where our Anerley rounds actually sit
Most of our work here runs along Anerley Road and the streets that climb off it. The hill is the thing you notice first. It is steep enough that, in the tram era, a fixed engine had to haul carriages up the worst stretch of Anerley Hill, and you feel that gradient on foot with a kit bag over one shoulder. The Crystal Palace transmitter sits up at the top, the tall lattice mast you can see from half of south London, and the streets near it are the highest ground we cover in the borough.
The housing is mostly Victorian. Grand terraces went up along Anerley Road from the 1860s once the railway arrived, and a lot of those tall houses were later split into flats, which is what we clean most of. Mixed in are pockets of ex-council blocks and a run of newer flats near the station. The plain fact is that an end of tenancy clean in a converted upper flat on Anerley Hill is a different job to one in a purpose-built flat off the high street, and we price and plan for both.
Anerley station is the anchor. It opened in 1839, when Sanderson reportedly told the railway his was “the annerly hoose” and the name went on the platform sign. These days it is on the London Overground Windrush line, the route that runs from Highbury and Islington down to West Croydon, and it sits in Zone 3. The old Southern trains through here stopped in 2022, so the Overground is now the spine of the area. Anerley Town Hall stands almost opposite the station, built in 1878 as the vestry hall and still in use as a community centre run by the Crystal Palace Community Trust.
The hill is the thing you notice first. The Crystal Palace transmitter sits up at the top, the tall lattice mast you can see from half of south London.
Then there is the park. Crystal Palace Park spills down the slope, and the lower gates on the Penge and Anerley side put the National Sports Centre, the boating lake and the famous concrete dinosaurs within a short walk of half our jobs. Down the other way is Betts Park, where a short length of the old Croydon Canal still holds water, a survivor from the 1800s most people walk past without clocking. The Anerley Arms, the old pub by the station that even gets a mention in a Sherlock Holmes story, is the sort of landmark a removals driver will know when a street name means nothing to them.
The postcode itself is shared, which shapes the work more than you might expect. SE20 covers Anerley, Penge and a slice of Beckenham, so the terraces here are close cousins of the ones a few streets over. A flat on the Anerley side of the boundary and one on the Penge side are usually the same build, the same period, the same hard water and the same cleaning headaches. We clean across that whole patch, including up the hill in Crystal Palace and along the ridge toward Sydenham, and the kit and the method travel between them without changing.
The split in the housing matters for how a clean goes. The big converted houses sit mostly on and around Anerley Road and up the hill, and they are the slow, high-ceilinged jobs. The newer flats cluster nearer the station and along the flatter ground, and they tend to be quicker, with modern kitchens and bathrooms that have not had a century to gather scale in the corners. When you tell us the street, we usually already know which of the two we are walking into.
The deposit rules that decide the money
An end of tenancy clean is really about one number: your deposit. Cleaning is the single most common reason money gets held back at the end of a tenancy in England, ahead of damage and rent arrears, and it is the deduction tenants most often dispute and win when they have done the work. So it pays to know how the rules actually run before you hand the keys back.
Your deposit has to be held in a government-backed protection scheme, and your landlord has 30 days from taking it to register it and tell you which scheme holds it. When you both agree how much comes back, the money is due to you within 10 days of that agreement. If you cannot agree, the scheme runs a free dispute service and an adjudicator decides, working from the evidence rather than anyone’s say-so.
The standard they apply is plain enough. You are expected to leave the place as clean as it was when you moved in, allowing for fair wear and tear, and you cannot be charged for things that simply age, like a carpet that has worn thin over six years. Citizens Advice spells this out and notes you usually have three months from moving out to put a claim to the scheme’s adjudicator. The check-in inventory from the start of your tenancy is what the whole thing is measured against, so dig it out before you book anyone.
If it does go to adjudication, evidence is everything. The adjudicator compares how clean the flat was at check-in with how clean it was at check-out, using the inventory photos and the clerk’s notes from both ends. A receipt for a professional clean carries real weight here, because it shows the work was done to a standard rather than rushed on the last morning. This is exactly why a documented clean against a known checklist beats a Saturday with a sponge: it gives you something to put in front of the adjudicator if your landlord pushes back.
One bigger change worth knowing. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 got Royal Assent in October 2025 and is reshaping how tenancies in England work, including doing away with the old assured shorthold tenancy. It does not change the basic deposit logic, though. Whatever your agreement is called, the property still has to go back clean against that opening inventory, and a clerk will still walk it room by room. The cleaning standard at the end of a tenancy is one of the few things the new law leaves more or less where it was.
- Check-in inventory
- The report made when you moved in, listing the condition and cleanliness of every room. It is the baseline your check-out is judged against, so a clean that beats it is the safe target.
- Fair wear and tear
- Gradual ageing a landlord must absorb, like faded paint or a carpet thinned by normal use. You cannot be charged to put it right, which is why a clean is not the same as a refurbishment.
- Deposit protection scheme
- A government-backed holder for your money during the tenancy. It also runs the free adjudication that settles a deposit row, as gov.uk sets out.
- Check-out report
- The inventory clerk’s final walk-through. Cleaning failures noted here are the ones that turn into deductions, and the ones our guarantee is built to head off.
What Bromley actually licenses
Anerley sits in the London Borough of Bromley, in the Crystal Palace and Anerley ward, and Bromley keeps its rented-housing licensing simple. There is no borough-wide selective scheme covering ordinary private lets here, and no extra additional-HMO scheme either. The council states it plainly: Bromley only operates the mandatory HMO licensing scheme. That is the national baseline that applies anywhere in England.
So what does that mean for your flat? Mandatory licensing bites on large houses in multiple occupation, the ones with five or more people from two or more households sharing facilities. A typical Anerley let, a one or two-bed flat in a converted terrace or a purpose-built block, is not caught by it. If you share a bigger house up near the hill with several others, it might be, and the licence is the landlord’s job, not yours. Bromley’s longer-term housing strategy has floated licensing all HMOs at some point, but no scheme and no date have been published, so the mandatory-only position is what holds today.
This matters at the end of a tenancy because a licensed HMO often comes with stricter written cleaning and safety standards baked into the licence, and a clerk will hold a shared house to those. We clean plenty of shared houses around the park and the station, and we treat the communal kitchen and the bathrooms as the rooms most likely to cost someone their share of the deposit. In a shared house the deposits are usually split between several tenants, so one filthy shared kitchen can pull money from everyone, which is why the housemate moving out last often gets landed with the worst of it.
It is worth saying that the lack of a selective scheme does not make the cleaning standard any softer. Selective licensing, where a council runs it, is mostly about housing conditions and management, not the check-out clean. Your deposit is governed by your tenancy agreement and the protection scheme regardless of whether the borough licenses the street, so an Anerley tenant faces exactly the same cleaning bar as a tenant in a borough that does run a scheme. The licensing position is useful to know; it just is not the thing that decides your deposit.
The 57-point clean, room by room
We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, which sounds like marketing until you watch a clean run against it. It is just the list of everything a south London inventory clerk has ever pulled us up on, written down so nothing gets skipped on a long day. The order below is roughly how a team moves through an Anerley flat.
The kitchen takes the longest and decides the most. The oven is the worst of it: degreasing the door glass, the racks, the back panel and the seal, because a greasy oven is the line item clerks reach for first. Hobs, extractor filters, the splashback, inside and on top of every cupboard, behind and underneath the appliances you can move. Fridges and freezers cleaned, defrosted and left open if the power is going off. In the hard-water flats near the hill the kettle and the taps fur up fast, so descaling those is on the list too.
Bathrooms are the other deduction magnet. Limescale is the enemy in SE20, on the taps, the shower screen, the tiles and the loo, and getting it off properly is slow work rather than clever work. We clean and polish the sanitaryware, scrub the grout, clear the plughole, wipe the extractor and leave the chrome actually shining rather than smeared.
Living rooms and bedrooms are about reach and dust. Skirting boards, picture rails, the tops of doors and frames, light fittings, switches and sockets, radiators front and back, and inside every fitted wardrobe. We clean window glass inside, the sills and the frames, and we get the cobwebs out of the high corners that the tall Victorian ceilings around here always seem to grow. Carpets vacuumed thoroughly; hard floors washed. In the older flats the radiators are often the heavy cast type, and dust packs in behind them where a quick once-over never reaches, so we get in there properly because a clerk with a torch will too.
Walls and doors get a look too. Scuff marks come off where they will, fingerprints around the handles and switches go, and we spot-clean the paintwork without trying to repaint, because a few marks that built up over a normal tenancy are fair wear and tear and not yours to fix. The same goes for tired carpet. We will clean it, but we are not papering over honest ageing, and a good clerk knows the difference.
The bits people forget are the bits clerks check. The inside of the airing cupboard. The meter cupboard. The front-door threshold. The hallway light nobody has touched since they moved in. The top edge of every internal door, where dust sits in a line you only see from a step stool. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is on the 57 points, which is the whole point of having them. A clerk who finds the obvious surfaces clean will go looking for the hidden ones, and our checklist is built so there is nothing left to find.
What an Anerley clean costs
Our end of tenancy prices are flat by property size, not dreamed up per postcode, and they cover the full clean against the 57 points. A studio is £156. A one-bed flat is £207. A two-bed is £243, a three-bed is £339, and a four-bed is £425. That is the clean itself, empty property, ready for the check-out.
If you would rather pay for time, say for a part-done flat or a single room, it is £30 per cleaner per hour. Carpets are charged on top because not every job needs them: £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat done together, which is the better deal if the place is carpeted throughout. Ovens, if you only want that one job rather than a full clean, run £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. You can see the detail on our oven cleaning and carpet cleaning pages.
Why those numbers hold up is the part that matters to your deposit. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, which means our checklist already matches what their clerks look for, and our cleans hit a 97% first-time pass rate. Over the years that record has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. We are not the cheapest quote you will get in SE20, and we do not pretend to be, but a £40 saving is poor value if it costs you a £300 deduction.
The SE20 jobs that eat the most time
Some of this is just what Anerley housing throws up, and it is worth knowing before you book so the quote makes sense. The water here is hard. That means scale builds quickly on taps, shower screens and kettles, and shifting it off a year’s worth of build-up in a kitchen takes real time, which is why an old flat near the hill can take longer than a newer one of the same size.
Then there is the age of the stock. A tall converted house gives you high ceilings, deep skirting, ornate cornicing and the original windows, all of which hold dust and all of which a clerk will run a finger along. Original sash windows in the older terraces are slow to do properly, with the cords, the runners and the glazing bars, and we factor that in rather than rushing it. The odd Victorian conversion up the hill has more decorative plasterwork than a whole modern block, and it all needs doing.
Access is the other quiet time-sink. Many of the flats are first or second floor with a shared stair and no lift, so kit and waste go up and down on foot, and parking on the streets off Anerley Road can be tight on a weekday. We plan around it; it just means we would rather know the floor and the parking when we quote than be surprised on the morning. A two-bed on the ground floor with off-street space is a smoother day than a two-bed up two flights, even at the same price.
Furnished lets add their own bit of work. A landlord-furnished flat means cleaning inside and behind furniture that often has not been moved in years, and the dust behind a wardrobe or under a sofa is precisely the kind of thing a thorough clerk pulls out a torch for. We move what is safe to move and clean behind it. If a sofa or mattress also needs freshening, that is a job we can quote on the day rather than something we slip into the headline price.
The flip side is that these are lovely flats to hand back clean. Get the scale off the bathroom and the grease out of the oven, and a period flat in Anerley shows beautifully, which is exactly what gets you the full deposit and a decent reference. We would honestly rather spend the extra half hour on the bathroom than have you back on the phone in three days because a clerk found a tap we missed.
Booking, and the re-clean promise
Booking is meant to be quick. Call us on 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your Anerley postcode, the number of bedrooms, whether it is furnished, and the floor and parking situation. We give you a fixed price from the sizes above, not a vague range, and we work seven days a week including weekends at no extra charge, which matters when check-out and move-out land on the same Saturday.
Try to book for after the removals van has gone and the flat is empty, because an empty flat cleans faster and better than one with the last boxes still in it. Tell us if the check-out clerk is coming the same day, and we will work to that clock. A little notice helps on the popular dates; the last Friday and Saturday of the month go quickly because half of Anerley seems to move out then.
If you can, leave the heating and hot water on and the power connected until we have finished. Hot water makes short work of grease and scale, and we cannot test that an oven or extractor is clean if there is no power to run it. We will tell you honestly if a flat is in a state that needs longer than a standard slot, rather than turning up, running out of time and leaving you exposed at the check-out. That straight talk is part of why agents keep us on their lists.
Here is the promise that should matter most. If the inventory clerk or your agent flags the cleaning, we come back and put it right under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee, free, within that window. We can offer that because we so rarely need to; the 97% first-time pass rate is the reason the guarantee costs us little. Our office is at 255 Upper Richmond Road West, SW14 8QS, and the same team covers the whole borough, so if you are moving on within Bromley you can read our Bromley end of tenancy cleaning page for the wider picture.
Questions Anerley tenants ask
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Anerley?
It is priced by size: £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. That is the full clean against our 57-point checklist on an empty property. Carpets and single ovens are charged separately if you want them.
Do you really guarantee the clean?
Yes. If the inventory clerk or your letting agent challenges the cleaning, we return and redo the flagged areas free under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee. With a 97% first-time pass rate we rarely have to, but the cover is there.
Will this clean get my deposit back?
Cleaning is the most common reason deposits get docked, so a clean to the agent standard removes the biggest risk. We have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits over the years. We cannot promise a landlord will not raise something else, like damage, but the cleaning side will be covered.
Does Anerley need a selective licence for my rented flat?
No. Bromley only operates the mandatory HMO licensing scheme, with no borough-wide selective or additional scheme, so an ordinary Anerley flat does not need a licence. Only large shared houses of five or more people from two or more households are caught, and that is the landlord’s responsibility.
What does the 57-point checklist actually cover?
Every room, top to bottom: oven, hob and extractor, all kitchen cupboards inside and out, bathrooms descaled, skirting, doors, frames, light fittings, sockets, radiators, inside wardrobes, window glass and sills, and the bits people forget like the airing and meter cupboards. It is built from what south London clerks check.
Do you clean the inside of the oven?
Yes, the oven is part of a full end of tenancy clean, with the door glass, racks, back panel and seal all degreased. If you only need the oven and nothing else, we can do that on its own from £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range.
How long does a clean take in an Anerley flat?
A one or two-bed flat is usually most of a working day for a small team. Older converted flats near the hill take longer because of the hard-water scale and the high Victorian ceilings, so tell us the size and floor and we will give you a realistic time with the quote.
Can you clean at weekends?
Yes, we work seven days a week, weekends included, at no extra charge. Move-out days are often Fridays and Saturdays, so weekend slots are the ones people ask for most and worth booking early.
Should the flat be empty before you clean?
Ideally yes. An empty flat cleans faster and to a higher standard, and a clerk checks an empty property anyway. Book us for after the removals van has left where you can, and we will fit around the check-out time.
Do I need to provide cleaning products or equipment?
No, we bring everything, including the kit for the hard-water descaling these SE20 flats need. Working hot water and power on the day help a lot, but you do not need to leave any products behind.
Do you cover Penge and Crystal Palace too?
Yes. We cover the whole SE20 patch and beyond, including Penge next door, up the hill to Crystal Palace and along to Sydenham, with the same team and the same checklist. The terraces are near-identical, so the job is much the same.
Is end of tenancy cleaning the same as a deep clean?
They overlap, but an end of tenancy clean is aimed specifically at the check-out inventory and the 57 points a clerk inspects, on an empty property. A deep clean is a thorough one-off in a flat you are staying in. For moving out, you want the end of tenancy version.
What if my carpets are stained?
We can clean carpets as an add-on, £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room or £115 for a whole two-bed. Genuine stains can sometimes lift and sometimes not, and where wear is just age it counts as fair wear and tear, which a landlord cannot charge you to replace.
Is there a parking problem for the cleaners?
The streets off Anerley Road can be tight on a weekday, and many flats are up a shared stair with no lift, so kit goes up and down on foot. None of it is a real obstacle, but it does affect timing, which is why we ask about the floor and parking when we quote rather than on the morning.
How do I get a price for my Anerley flat?
Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the number of bedrooms, whether it is furnished, and the floor and parking. We give a fixed price from our size bands, not a vague range, and we can usually book you in for the day you need including weekends.