Bow Common’s end of tenancy cleaning team

End of tenancy cleaning in Bow Common, E3, done to the inventory-clerk standard your Tower Hamlets agent will hold the deposit against. We clear studios from £156 and one-beds from £207, every clean backed by a 48-hour re-clean guarantee and a 97% first-time pass rate. 0333 555 2076 for same-week availability across E3 4, E3 3 and the western edge of E14 6.

Last updated May 2026. Coverage runs from Bow Common Lane and Burdett Road through St Paul’s Way, the Devons Road cluster and the Limehouse Cut canalside. This page sits inside our wider Tower Hamlets end of tenancy cleaning service.

The building site on Bow Common Lane

Stand on Bow Common Lane today and the biggest thing in view is a fence. Behind it, on the 3.86-hectare former gasworks between Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park and Knapp Road, St William is building out a scheme that Tower Hamlets approved in 2022 and refined in 2025. It will deliver up to 1,450 homes, a new park of about a hectare, a sixth-form college and a restored Victorian gasworks office. The cranes have been up since construction started, and the hoardings are part of the daily walk to Mile End station for anyone living nearby.

That matters at move-out, and not for the obvious reason. Every new block that completes pours fresh developer-spec flats into the E3 lettings pool, each one handed over with a glossy inventory that becomes the benchmark the local agents measure older flats against. When a clerk has spent the morning checking a brand-new kitchen at one of these schemes, the bar they bring to your 1990s conversion that afternoon is higher than it was five years ago. We see it in the reports.

So the area splits in two. New stock with long, itemised schedules, and older stock judged by new-stock standards. A clean that ignores either half loses you money.

There is a second effect worth knowing about. A live construction site next door means dust, and fine building dust travels. Tenants on Bow Common Lane and Knapp Road tell us they wipe sills twice a week and the grime still comes back, which is true, and it is also the first thing a clerk runs a finger along. We bring that up because a flat that backs onto the works needs the window reveals and trickle vents done properly at check-out, not a quick pass. The dust settles in the frame channels, and that is precisely where a report logs it.

What the deposit arithmetic looks like

Here is the money on the line. Average private rent across Tower Hamlets hit £2,396 a month in ONS data published in early 2026, up about 1.8% on the year and a little above the London figure. A typical Bow Common one-bed therefore carries a deposit of around £2,200 to £2,400, and a two-bed at Bow Quarter or one of the newer blocks sits closer to £2,600 to £2,950. Five weeks of rent, held by a third party, released only when the check-out report says so.

Cleaning is where most of that gets chipped away. In the reports we work alongside, limescale and grout discolouration together drive roughly 35% of the deductions, with oven interiors, skirting boards and the floor behind the toilet making up most of the rest. None of it is dramatic. It is the boring, missable stuff, and that is exactly why it gets charged.

The water does not help. Mains supply through this part of the East End runs hard, with calcium-carbonate around 280 to 330 mg/l, so a shower screen scales visibly within a few months of a tenant moving in and a kettle furs up faster than anyone expects.

Those four numbers sit behind every booking. The 57-point checklist is the method, the 97% first-time pass rate is what it produces across more than 12,000 jobs since 2014, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee is the safety net, and the £1.2m is the running total of deposit money we have helped tenants keep that would otherwise have gone on cleaning charges.

It is the boring, missable stuff, and that is exactly why it gets charged.

Concrete, glass and the 1860s

Bow Common does not read like the Victorian-terrace image people carry of the East End. The landmark here is concrete. St Paul’s church, at the corner of Burdett Road and St Paul’s Way in E3 4AR, was built between 1956 and 1960 by Robert Maguire and Keith Murray, judged the best modern church in the country since 1953, and lined inside with an 800-foot mosaic by Charles Lutyens. It is Grade II*-listed brutalism, and it sets the tone for an area shaped far more by post-war building than by sash windows.

The cleaning brief shifts hard with the building. Get it wrong and the clerk finds it.

Bow Quarter, on Fairfield Road, is the converted Bryant and May match factory, the 1861 works where the 1888 matchgirls’ strike happened and where a blue plaque went up in 2022. Kentish Homes turned it into 714 flats and 19 townhouses in the late 1980s, and the Grade II-listed buildings keep exposed brick, cast-iron radiators and Crittall-style steel windows whose frames trap dust in a way agents always check. The new blocks rising on the gasworks site are the opposite end of the spectrum: integrated AEG and Bosch appliance suites, induction hobs, fan ovens with telescopic runners, fully integrated dishwashers and fridge-freezers, every one of which a clerk pulls and inspects at check-out. Then there are the post-war LCC and GLC estates around Devons Road and St Paul’s Way, with parquet halls and painted skirting profiles that hide dust like nothing else, and a thin band of early-Victorian terraces near Tredegar Square where the page bleeds into Mile End and you do get cornice and ceiling roses. We tune the 57-point checklist to whichever of these you are leaving.

Take the match-factory flats as the clearest example. The Crittall-style steel windows at Bow Quarter look simple, but the frames are made up of narrow channels and a deep rebate, and dust packs into them over a tenancy in a way a domestic vacuum will not shift. Clerks here open the casements and check the corners, every time. The exposed brick is the other trap, because it holds kitchen grease as a faint film you only notice under a strong light, which is the light a clerk uses. On the new gasworks blocks the problem flips entirely. The surfaces are easy, but the appliance schedule is long, and a fan oven with telescopic runners has a back panel and seal that a tenant has usually never cleaned in the whole tenancy.

A few terms come up at every check-out in this postcode. Plain versions:

Check-in inventory

The dated, photographed record of a flat’s condition at the start of your tenancy. The check-out report is measured against it, so the cleaner is really cleaning to that document, not to a general idea of tidy.

Demised area

The part of the building your tenancy actually covers. It usually includes your balcony and your front-door threshold, which is why both get inspected, and excludes communal corridors.

Selective and additional licensing

Council schemes that require a landlord to hold a property licence. Tower Hamlets has run a borough-wide Additional HMO Licensing Scheme since April 2024, and a licensed property carries cleanliness conditions a clerk can enforce.

Etched glass

A shower screen where long-term scale has pitted the glass itself. No descaler reverses it, so we tell you before the clean rather than after.

The three licences behind your check-out

Three pieces of housing rule shape how hard a Bow Common check-out gets inspected, and it helps to know them before the clerk arrives.

The first is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. It ends Section 21 no-fault evictions in England, turns assured shorthold tenancies into periodic ones and caps advance rent at a month. The practical effect at move-out is blunt. Landlords have lost the easy route to reset a tenancy, so they lean harder on every legitimate deduction instead, and cleaning is the most defensible category they have. It is also the easiest one for you to take off the table with a paid-up clean and a dated receipt. Shelter’s deposit guidance walks through the dispute route if it ever gets that far.

The second is licensing. Since 1 April 2024 the whole borough has sat under an Additional HMO Licensing Scheme that runs to 2029, so any flat in Bow Common shared by three or more people from two or more households needs a licence. A separate Selective Licensing Scheme covers the Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown wards and is set to expire on 30 September 2026. Licensed HMO landlords inspect cleanliness hard at check-out because their licence conditions make them, so fire-door seals, kitchen-extractor housings and shared bathroom grout are scored items, not opinions.

The third is the Article 4 Direction in force across the borough since January 2021, which removed the automatic right to split a family house into a small shared HMO. It is the reason much of the genuinely shared accommodation here is older and more tightly inspected. Tenancy Deposit Scheme guidance sets out what a landlord can and cannot legitimately take off a deposit, and cleaning to a documented standard keeps you well inside those lines.

Where our vans actually go

We run E3 daily, which is why a Bow Common slot rarely needs much lead time. The 323 bus traces most of our patch, from Mile End station down Bow Common Lane to Devons Road and on toward Bromley-by-Bow, and the 309, D6 and D7 cover the St Paul’s Way and Burdett Road side. Streets and blocks we are in most weeks:

• Bow Common Lane, including the new homes rising on the old gasworks
• Burdett Road and the parade between Mile End station and the canal
• St Paul’s Way, the LCC estates and the modern infill near the church
• Bow Quarter on Fairfield Road, the converted match factory
• The Devons Road DLR cluster and the streets off Knapp Road
• Wellington Way and the Coborn Road conservation pocket
• Tredegar Square and the terraces where Bow Common runs into Mile End
• Mile End Park canalside flats along the Regent’s Canal
• Limehouse Cut waterside conversions toward the E14 boundary

If you drive, the streets off Bow Common Lane are permit-controlled most of the day, and parking around the cemetery park end is the worst part of any job here. Most of our crews come in by bus or the DLR at Devons Road and carry the kit, so access rarely depends on a parking bay.

The canalside flats deserve a separate note. Where Bow Common runs down to the Limehouse Cut and across to the Regent’s Canal at Mile End Park, a lot of the stock is converted warehouse and waterside infill, and the damp coming off the water shows up as black spotting on bathroom silicone and window rubbers faster than it does a few streets inland. It is the same mould a clerk marks down, so on those flats we treat the seals as a priority rather than an afterthought. If your flat looks onto the towpath, mention it when you book, because we will plan an extra half hour for the bathroom.

The 57-point list, room by room

The same 57-point checklist runs on every Bow Common flat, adjusted for the building. It is the method behind the 97% first-time pass rate, and it is built around what clerks in E3 actually write up.

Kitchen

• Oven interior, both sides of the door glass, seals, racks and trays, stripped and degreased
• Hob, extractor hood, the filter and the grease trap behind it
• Integrated appliances pulled where they come out: dishwasher, washing machine, fridge-freezer
• Cupboard interiors, drawer runners, cutlery trays and soft-close hinges
• Tile grout, splashback, sink, taps and waste, descaled
• Skirting, plinths and the toe-kick under the units
• Window reveals, frames and the inside of the glass
• Light fittings, switch plates and sockets
• Worktops polished, natural stone sealed where it needs it
• Behind freestanding appliances wherever they move

Bathrooms

• Scale off the shower screen, taps, showerhead and tiling
• Grout deep-cleaned and any mould treated
• Toilet done under the rim, behind the cistern and along the floor join
• Bath panel taken off where it comes away and cleaned behind
• Extractor fan housing, grille and filter
• Mirror, cabinet, light fittings and switch plates
• Skirting and the wall-to-floor sealant line
• Towel rail and the radiator behind it, sides and top

Bedrooms and living areas

• Skirting boards, the single most-cited deduction in E3 reports
• Carpets vacuumed on professional kit, with steam extraction available as an add-on
• Window frames, sills, reveals and interior glass
• Steel and Crittall window frames where the older Bow Quarter flats keep them
• Door tops, handles, hinges and frames
• Cornice and ceiling roses in the Tredegar Square terraces, where they exist
• Switch plates, sockets and cable trunking
• Radiators behind, sides and top
• Wardrobe interiors and tops, built-in storage cleaned out
• Balcony decking, glass railings and balcony-side frames on the newer blocks
• Picture and poster holes filled with basic filler, touched up where you leave the paint

Throughout

Hallways, stairs and landings inside your demised area; bulbs replaced where they are already fitted; the letterbox, intercom and video-entry handset wiped down; the basement storage cage cleaned out on the blocks that have them; and a final walk-through with date-stamped photographs emailed to you and your agent before we lock up. No bullet list survives contact with a real flat, so the crew works the document, not the page.

What it costs to clear an E3 flat

Fixed prices, inclusive of VAT, materials, equipment, travel and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. No hourly billing and no upcharge once we are through the door.

Prices for the standalone services are on the dedicated oven cleaning, carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning and window cleaning pages, all of which we run across E3.

The order a clerk walks a flat in

Twelve years of working alongside inventory clerks in E3 tells you the rough order they check in, and where the deductions cluster. The new-build items sit lower on the list only because there are fewer of those flats, not because clerks skim them.

1. Oven-door interior glass and the oven seals, the most common deduction across every property type
2. Extractor filter and hood interior, worst on the integrated kitchens in the newer blocks
3. Scale on the shower screen, taps and showerhead
4. Skirting scuffs, dust and paint chips
5. Carpet marks, with furniture pulled forward to look beneath
6. Behind the toilet, the base of the pedestal and the floor-to-wall sealant
7. Window reveals and frame internals, missed more often than anything else
8. Inside cupboards and drawers, kitchen and bedroom alike
9. Balcony decking and glass railings on the newer flats
10. The communal threshold at your own front door
11. Light fittings, for dust, dead flies and grease inside shades
12. Mould and grout discolouration in bathroom tiling and silicone
13. Steel and Crittall frames in the Bow Quarter conversions
14. The basement storage cage, where one is assigned

One booking from earlier this year makes the point. A couple leaving a two-bed at Bow Quarter had a Sunday move-out with the clerk booked first thing Monday, and the agent had already flagged the kitchen extractor and the bath panel as inspection-critical. The previous flatmate had smoked indoors. Our crew started at 7.30 that Sunday, pulled the integrated dishwasher, descaled the screen until the glass ran clear, and took the bath panel off and back on with no marks. The clerk found nothing to write up, and the deposit came back in full the following week. That is the standard the 48-hour re-clean guarantee exists to protect.

No bullet list survives contact with a real flat, so the crew works the document, not the page.

End of tenancy against a deep clean

People mix these up, and booking the wrong one wastes money. A regular clean keeps a lived-in flat ticking over. A deep clean goes further but assumes you are staying. End of tenancy is the only one built around an empty flat and a clerk’s report.

Moving in after building work instead of out? Our after-builders cleaning is the right starting point, not end of tenancy. Want a refresh before viewings or photos? A one-off deep clean is the call.

Booking a Bow Common clean

Five steps, start to finish:

1. Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the property size and your check-out date
2. We confirm how we get in, whether that is a concierge, a key safe or the agent
3. You get a fixed quote by email inside 30 minutes during office hours
4. A 25% deposit by card or transfer locks the slot
5. The crew cleans on the day, sends before and after photos, and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee starts the moment they leave

We cover every cleaning category across Bow Common as one E3 service area:

• Oven and range cleaning
• Carpet cleaning and steam extraction
• Upholstery and mattress cleaning
• Window cleaning
• One-off deep cleans
• After-builders cleans
• Hard-floor cleaning and sealing
• Removals coordinated with end of tenancy

Neighbouring areas we reach on the same E3 routing include Mile End, Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Stepney Green and Poplar. The full picture sits on the Tower Hamlets end of tenancy cleaning hub.

Questions Bow Common tenants ask

How long does end of tenancy cleaning take in a Bow Common one-bed?

A one-bed in good order takes 4 to 6 hours with a two-cleaner team. A heavily lived-in flat can run 7 to 9 hours with three cleaners. We do not bill by the hour for end of tenancy. The price is fixed at booking and the crew stays until the job is done.

Do you guarantee my deposit back?

We cannot guarantee what your landlord or agent decides, because only they hold the deposit. What we guarantee is the cleaning standard. If your agent flags a cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we come back and re-clean at no charge until they sign you off. That guarantee has paid out on about 3% of jobs over 12 years.

Do you bring all the equipment and products?

Yes. Industrial vacuums, steam machines for grout and tile, professional oven kit, ladders and all the chemicals. Your flat needs to provide nothing except access and running water.

Can you do a same-day or next-day clean?

Often, yes. Bow Common and the wider E3 corridor are inside our standard zone, with crews routed through daily. Call by 4pm and we can usually fit a next-morning slot. Same-day is possible but adds £35 to £60 depending on the time.

Do you clean carpets as part of the service?

Vacuuming is in the headline price. Professional steam extraction is a separate add-on at £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room or £115 for a typical two-bed. Some tenancy agreements on the newer E3 blocks ask for a steam-clean receipt, which we email on completion.

Do you clean balconies on the newer blocks near the gasworks?

Yes. Balcony decking or tile, glass railings and balcony-side window frames are included where the balcony is part of your demised area. We do not clean planters or take out tenant-fitted extras unless you arrange it first.

Do you do exterior windows?

Interior glass and reveals are standard. Exterior glass on ground-floor and reachable first-floor windows is included where it is safe. For mid-rise blocks we coordinate with the building’s contracted facade cleaner if your inventory schedule asks for the outside.

Is the price different for furnished and unfurnished flats?

Yes, but not by much. Furnished adds roughly 10 to 15%, because there is more surface and we pull furniture forward to clean behind it. We confirm the figure once you tell us the size and how furnished it is.

Do I need to be there during the clean?

No. Plenty of our Bow Common clients leave keys with a building concierge or arrange a pickup with the letting agent. We send before and after photos when we lock up, so you can see the state we left it in.

The shower screen has heavy limescale. Can you get it off?

In most cases, yes. East London water is hard, around 280 to 330 mg/l of calcium-carbonate, and scale on screens, taps and showerheads is the biggest single category of deposit disputes we see in E3. We use professional descalers that high-street sprays cannot match. If the glass is etched, meaning the surface itself is pitted, no chemical fixes that, and we tell you upfront.

The inventory clerk is coming the same day as your team. Does that work?

We would rather have a 24-hour gap so the flat can dry and any touch-ups can be sorted. If the timing is fixed, ask us to start at 7am. The crew can clear a one-bed by 1pm and a two-bed by mid-afternoon.

Do I pay upfront?

A 25% deposit at booking, the balance on the day. We take bank transfer, card and Apple or Google Pay. We are VAT-registered and email a full receipt to whichever address you choose, including straight to your agent if you prefer.

What if the flat is in a really bad state?

We have cleaned post-eviction, post-pet and post-renovation flats across E3. Send 6 to 8 photos by WhatsApp before you book and we quote accurately. A heavily soiled flat may move from end of tenancy pricing onto our by-the-hour rate of £30 per cleaner. No surprises mid-job.

Will you clean the storage cage in the basement?

On the blocks that have them, yes. Mention the cage at booking. It is usually in the headline price, though a particularly large or full one may add £15 to £25.

Book your Bow Common clean

Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your Bow Common address, your check-out date and the size of the flat. You get a fixed quote inside 30 minutes during office hours and a same-week or next-week slot. From £156 for a studio, the full 57-point checklist, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, and photographs on completion. Since 2014 we have worked with 300+ letting agents and helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.