On a listed flat off Clapham Old Town, the check-out clerk gets the stepladder out before they open the oven. Twelve-foot ceilings and original cornicing mean the dust in the egg-and-dart undercut is invisible from the floor and named line by line in the inventory, so the report on a Georgian villa here is a paper-trail event a new-build never is.
That is what end-of-tenancy cleaning around SW4 0 has to answer: the clerk with the ladder and the torch, not a tidy weekend. Checklist-driven, deposit-focused, priced by bedroom count, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.
Last updated June 2026. We cover Clapham Old Town in full, the core postcode being SW4 0 around the Old Town triangle and North Side, plus the SW4 7 bleed across Clapham High Street and the SW4 9 edge towards Abbeville. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lambeth.
Why the inventory is longer on a listed Old Town flat
End of tenancy cleaning
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For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
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Start with the mechanism, because it is the whole game and almost nobody looks at it until they have already lost a round.
- When you moved into a period flat around the Old Town, a clerk walked it and wrote a report describing every surface, nearly always with photos, with “new”, “as new” or “good” set against the kitchen, the bathroom and, on the grander flats, each original feature by name.
- At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line.
- Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable.
Old Town has a twist the rest of Clapham does not. Most of the stock is Georgian and early-Victorian, a good deal of it Grade II listed or inside the Clapham conservation area.
The clerks here are unusually forensic because the original fabric is written into the report as named items. A generic flat gets a line for “walls, ceiling, floor”. Each named line is a place you can be marked down.
Two bits of law sit underneath this and pull in opposite directions.
- The Tenant Fees Act 2019
- A Lambeth landlord cannot write professional cleaning into the contract as a condition, so nobody can force you to book us.
- Damp and mould
- These are a landlord obligation, not a tenant cleaning failure. Where we find real damp behind a wardrobe or in a basement corner, we photograph it, so the charge sits where it belongs.
A generic flat gets a line for the walls. A listed villa gets a line for the cornice, the ceiling rose, the parquet and the register grate.
What 1 May 2026 changed for an Old Town move-out
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026.
- Section 21
- No-fault evictions are gone.
- Existing tenancies
- Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has rolled over to a periodic tenancy.
- Notice
- A tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point instead of waiting for a fixed term to end.
Here is the part people get backwards. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change one bit. The check-in benchmark still applies, and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before.
What changed is timing. With narrower possession routes, the deposit dispute is now the main lever a landlord has, so the inventory carries more weight than ever.
Old Town is not the churn machine that the High Street end of Clapham is. Move-outs are less frequent, but a long tenancy means a deeper clean at the end, because five years of cobweb dust in the cornicing and wax build-up on the parquet is a bigger job than a one-year flat throws up.
A listed house is a long day, so book earlier than you think you need to.
The 57 things we work through, room by room
Every Old Town booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist tuned to what this patch’s clerks flag.
The kitchen, where a chunk of the deposit goes
The oven, booked as an add-on from £31, is cleaned properly, not wiped:
- racks go into a soak
- the door glass is split apart where the door lets us, so the brown film baked between the panes comes out
- the interior, fan and seals are cleaned by hand
If the oven is all your agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it from £77.
Then the rest of the room:
- Hob rings and burners lift off, knobs off and washed; a lot of the refitted Old Town kitchens have a range cooker, which takes longer and gets its own line on the quote
- The extractor hood degreased inside and out, and the baffle filter soaked or swapped
- Every cupboard, inside, outside, top and underneath
- Integrated fridge and freezer cleaned through once defrosted
- Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under them are done, then put back
- The washing-machine drum, the detergent drawer out and scrubbed, and the door seal, which is the first thing the clerk opens
- Sink, taps and plughole descaled
- Tiles and grout scrubbed, bins washed, floor mopped last
Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong
Hard-water scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, then the rest, in plain order.
- Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, the base, the cistern, the hinges, and behind the pedestal
- Shower screen both sides, the runner track and the sealant bead
- Bath, taps and their undersides, overflow and plughole; roll-top baths get their feet and underside too
- Original cast-iron radiators where present, back, fins and brackets, wiped by hand not sprayed
- Mirrors, cabinets and behind them, the extractor grille, and the floor into the corners behind the loo and under the basin
Bedrooms, living rooms and everything between
- Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard
- Skirting, door frames, doors, handles, and the original brass door furniture on the listed flats, which tarnishes and gets checked
- Light fittings and shades, switches, and the ceiling roses, dusted centre first and then the outer ring
- Window sills, reveals and frames inside; the original box windows on the North Side want slow, careful work rather than glass spray blasted in
- Radiators behind, under and on top
- Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and honest scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub
- Curtains shaken, nets washed if you ask
- Sofas and armchairs hoovered through
Two of these often need their own pass.
- Carpets
- Professional hot-water extraction on carpets is written into a fair number of Clapham tenancies as a hard requirement, which the carpet cleaning add-on covers on the same visit, from £29 a room.
- Sofas
- Hard-used sofas in a furnished house sometimes need full upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover.
Then everything else:
- switches, sockets, thermostats and entryphones
- internal doors both sides, original frames and architraves
- the stairs, bannister and spindles most Old Town houses keep
Last, a final walk-through with a torch held up to catch what daylight hides, especially the cornice runs above twelve feet, photographed room by room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.
Cornicing, parquet and cast iron: the four surfaces that cost the time
Four surfaces make an Old Town clean slower than a modern flat. They are the four the inventory names and the four a DIY clean gets wrong, because the method is the whole difference.
First, the cornicing
Drawing-room ceilings on the Macaulay Road and Rectory Grove villas run twelve feet, sometimes fourteen, and the cornice is usually original lime plaster: egg-and-dart, dentil runs, foliate mouldings.
Cobweb dust collects in the undercut where you cannot see it from the floor, and the clerk finds it with a torch held up at the right angle. We work it with an extending pole and a soft-bristle head, on a ladder for the close runs, because dragging a vacuum brush across original lime plaster chips it.
Second, the parquet
A lot of Old Town flats kept the original block oak parquet in herringbone or basket-weave. A standard mop-and-bucket lifts the wax and leaves a dull patch the clerk spots at once. We work it without stripping the finish:
- a dry buff with a microfibre
- a dilute soap-and-water pass
- then a dry buff again
Third and fourth, the grates and the windows
- Cast-iron register grates
- The painted tile cheeks and the iron take a soft brush and no spray, because a spray cleaner pits the iron and lifts the glaze.
- Box windows and reveals
- The originals are worked by hand, with dust lifted out of the parting bead and the sill mitre where it gathers.
What Thames Water leaves on the chrome
Clapham sits in London’s hard-water zone, on the Thames Water network, and south of the river the supply tests at around 296 parts per million of calcium carbonate, very hard and near the top of the London range. That one fact loses more deposits here than almost anything except the oven.
Calcium builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks it two ways:
- a thumbnail run down the tap
- the screen, looked at edge-on against the light
In the period flats the fittings are often original chrome, which rules out the brute-force descaler a modern flat would shrug off. So we use a proper descaling acid with real dwell time, then a polish.
The hard-water lines fail predictably because the tenant tried, but with the wrong product.
Grout is the other one, the line between a pass and a deduction here more often than carpets. We scrub it rather than wipe it.
Where it is genuinely past saving we photograph the state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in. That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.
That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.
Specialist floors sit outside the scrub-and-go work.
- Floors
- Original parquet in a villa conversion, a Victorian tiled hallway, engineered board in a newer refit: each takes its own product, which the floor cleaning add-on covers.
- Exterior glass
- On a listed frontage it folds into the same visit as window cleaning when the inventory asks.
The Old Town triangle, street by street
Clapham Old Town is the historic, village-feel heart of Clapham, gathered round the Old Town triangle where the Sun pub and the old coaching-inn quarter meet, a short walk from the Common and Clapham Common tube. The stock changes as you cross it.
The North Side and the Georgian core
Along Clapham Common North Side, the grand Georgian and early-Victorian terraces face the Common, many kept as single-family houses or split into large, high-ceilinged conversion flats.
- The Polygon
- The oldest stock is the Georgian cluster: The Polygon, an early-to-mid eighteenth-century terrace of three-storey houses facing Holy Trinity Church, Grade II listed since 1974.
- Grafton Square, The Chase and Elms Road
- Around it sits the premium grid of listed villas, where the inventory names original detail item by item.
The Old Town itself and Venn Street
The triangle at the centre holds flats above the shops and the Winkworth and Marsh & Parsons runs on Old Town.
Venn Street, home to the Saturday food market and the Clapham Picturehouse, sits right here, making the flats above it a livelier, higher-turnover corner than the North Side houses.
Macaulay Road, Orlando Road and North Street run off with their mid-Victorian Italianate villas, a lot of them converted to upper and lower flats with tall drawing-room windows and the cornicing that costs cleaners hours.
Rectory Grove, Turret Grove and the western edge
West of the triangle, Rectory Grove, Turret Grove and Clapham Manor Street form the older conservation core, listed Georgian and early-Victorian terraces with basements and attic storeys. Further out the stock mixes:
- the late-Victorian Cedars estate around Cedars Road
- the modern infill on Macaulay Walk and Rectory Gardens
- the SW4 9 edge towards Abbeville
Long lets down here mean build-up in the places nobody cleaned between tenants, and we win those on the dull, slow work.
People mix up the Claphams constantly, and the pages next door cover their own patch:
- Clapham Common for the flats wrapped round the Common
- Clapham North up towards the Northern-line junction and the High Street strip
- Clapham South on the Balham side
- Clapham Park east of the Common
Not sure which side of a boundary you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds.
Clapham Town ward, licensing and why the clerk reads the report closely
Clapham Old Town falls in the London Borough of Lambeth, and most of it, including The Polygon, Macaulay Road and Rectory Grove, sits in the Clapham Town ward. That ward is covered by Lambeth’s second selective licensing scheme.
- Selective licensing
- Live from 1 September 2025 for five years, alongside Clapham Common and Abbeville and most of the rest of the borough; only the Vauxhall and Waterloo wards sit outside it. Any private landlord letting a single-household flat in the ward needs a licence, at £1,025 per property, and letting one without is a civil-penalty offence.
- Additional HMO licensing
- Separately, Lambeth runs a borough-wide additional HMO scheme for homes shared by three or four unrelated people, which currently runs to 8 December 2026.
- Mandatory HMO licensing
- On top of both sits the national mandatory scheme for larger five-person-plus HMOs.
What that means at the end of a tenancy is straightforward. A licence creates a paper trail the council can reference in a dispute, so licensed properties tend to get walked more closely.
In a licensed HMO the shared areas are inspected in their own right:
- communal stairs
- the hallway
- the front-area gate on a basement let
We price HMO common parts as standard rooms, so you are not paying twice. The licence changed how the landlord documents the property, not the cleaning standard.
What it costs, and the sum that outruns the clean
Old Town is priced by bedroom count, with kit and products included; a part property or an unusual layout is £30 per cleaner per hour.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (over the shops, Old Town triangle) | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £156 |
| 1-bed flat or conversion (Rectory Grove, Polygon) | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed villa flat (Macaulay Road, Orlando Road) | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed conversion or larger flat (Cedars Road) | 7-9 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed whole house (The Chase, Grafton Square) | Full day, 2-3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Carpet cleaning add-on | Same visit | From £29 per room |
| Oven-only clean | 1.5-2 hours | From £77 |
There is no premium loaded on for a listed frontage. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. These cost more:
- a long tenancy with heavy wear
- a pet household
- a whole house that has not had a deep clean in years
The listed detail adds hours too, so we say so on the phone rather than after.
Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed villa flat at £243, or a whole house at £425, set against a deposit on a property worth well over a million, is not really a decision.
Every Old Town booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags any cleaning issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided:
- you tell us inside that window
- nobody has moved in
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
It helps to book the right job, because three cleans get muddled.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document the clerk writes on day one describing every surface, and on a listed flat every original feature, with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a vague idea of “clean”.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at a fixed price by bedroom count.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are staying in, with no formal standard to hit, from £26 an hour per cleaner.
- Regular domestic clean
- A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £23 an hour on a weekly booking.
Booking it around the month-end crush
Book early. Even in a settled patch, Clapham clusters its check-outs on the last few days of the month, and a listed house is a long day that needs a proper slot, so ringing on the 29th for the 31st rarely works. The steps are simple.
- Ring 0333 555 2076. Price in about three minutes. Give us the postcode, the property size, the check-out date and any known problem areas, and mention any listed-building considerations and anything the report marked “new” or “as new”.
- We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow 7 to 10 days for an end-of-month slot, 3 to 5 days mid-month, and a bit more for a whole house.
- Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared. We also do removals if you want the move and the clean on one booking, which helps on the tighter Old Town streets.
- Photo proof at the end. Every room, before and after, with an itemised invoice on company-headed paper for the deposit file.
- Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.
One honest note on access. Much of the Old Town is controlled-parking, the bays are tight, and some North Side houses are reached through a front-garden gate. Tell us the arrangement when you book:
- a permit
- a key safe
- an agent drop-off
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Clapham Old Town?
From £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed villa flat or conversion, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed whole house. Old Town is priced by bedroom count, with kit included, and a listed frontage does not change the price. Carpet cleaning and larger oven jobs are priced separately.
Why does a listed Old Town flat take longer, and do you cover the original features?
Yes, listed villa flats are most of what we do here, and they take longer because the inventory names the original features individually and each needs its own method. Twelve-foot cornicing is worked with an extending pole and a soft head off a ladder, parquet is dry-buffed with microfibre rather than mopped, cast-iron register grates and painted tile cheeks take a soft brush and no spray, and the box windows are done by hand, with nothing aggressive on original lime plaster. A two-bed villa flat a modern two-bed would clear in five hours can take us six to eight. If you have listed-building considerations on Macaulay Road, Rectory Grove or The Polygon, tell us at booking so we send a team that has done conservation-area work before.
Do I really need professional end-of-tenancy cleaning in SW4 0?
You are allowed to do it yourself; the Tenant Fees Act 2019 stops a landlord making it a contractual condition. The catch is the benchmark: your check-in standard was set by a professional clean, and on a listed flat the report also names each original feature, so matching it without the right kit is genuinely hard. With Old Town deposits sitting on high-value flats, the maths usually points one way.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change anything for Old Town tenants?
From 1 May 2026, Section 21 evictions are abolished and every assured shorthold tenancy converts to a periodic tenancy, so tenants can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning obligations do not change; with possession routes narrower, the deposit dispute carries more weight, so the inventory is read more closely than ever.
Do you guarantee my deposit back?
We cannot guarantee the deposit itself, because the inventory has plenty of lines we do not touch: paint, wear and tear, the landlord’s furniture. What we guarantee is the cleaning side. If the inventory clerk flags any cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we come back at no charge under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee.
Can you clean a range cooker, and is it extra?
Yes. A single oven is a £31 add-on to the standard clean; a double oven or a 90cm range cooker takes longer and is £62. A lot of the refitted Old Town kitchens have a range, so mention it when you book and we fold it into the fixed quote.
Do you handle HMO common parts under Lambeth’s licensing scheme?
We do. Communal stairs, hallways, shared kitchens and shared bathrooms get priced as standard rooms, not extras. Lambeth’s selective licensing in the Clapham Town ward and its borough-wide additional HMO scheme changed how landlords document a property, not the cleaning standard. In a licensed HMO the shared parts are simply walked in their own right, and the front-area gate on a basement let gets checked too.
Do I need to be there, and what if my landlord uses a specific inventory firm?
No, you do not need to be there; most Old Town clients leave a key with the agent on Old Town or The Pavement, or use a key safe, and we send a written check-out report by email when we leave. Tell us the inventory firm when you book. We have worked with most of the SW4 0 clerks and the local agents, Marsh & Parsons and Winkworth on Old Town among them, and we know which lean strict on the listed-feature lines.
Are you insured, and who are you?
Yes. We hold public liability cover. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, trading since 2014. The insurance certificate is available on request.
How quickly can you book me in?
Usually 48 to 72 hours across SW4 0 and the SW4 7 and SW4 9 borders, and same-day work is sometimes possible if a team is finishing nearby around Macaulay Road or Rectory Grove. For an end-of-month slot on a whole house, give us a week or more.