Cleaver Square end of tenancy cleaning

Cobweb dust caught in the undercut of a drawing-room cornice, twelve feet up, invisible from the floor and obvious the second a torch goes on it. That is the Cleaver Square deduction, and it is why a clerk here turns up with a step-ladder. Most of the square is listed Georgian, the ceilings are tall, and the clean is slower than a new-build because it has to be. Checklist-driven, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SE11 4 core, which is the square and the streets around it, plus the SE11 5 bleed south across Kennington Lane. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lambeth.

The square was built in instalments, and the walk-round shows it

Cleaver Square was laid out in 1789 on pasture Mary Cleaver had inherited in 1743, developed by Thomas Ellis, who ran the Horns Tavern on Kennington Common. It was the first garden square in South London. It was called Prince’s Square for most of its life; the London County Council renamed it after Mary Cleaver in 1937. None of that would matter to a cleaner except for one thing: the square went up over sixty-five years, in batches, and the batches are not the same house.

The entrance terraces on Kennington Park Road came first, in 1788. The north-west side followed in 1789. Numbers 34 to 41 on the south side went up in 1792, more south-side houses between 1815 and 1824, and the south-east terrace at 21 to 33 arrived much later, between 1844 and 1853. Groups including 1 to 20, 34 to 41 and 50 to 52 carry Grade II listing. So a clean on the 1789 side and a clean on the 1850s side are two different jobs. The earlier houses run taller in the principal rooms and hold more original plasterwork. The later ones have plainer runs and more of the fabric has been replaced.

This is a small patch. We are honest about that. Cleaver Square is a square, not a district, and the work we do around it sits on Bowden Street between Methley Street and the square, on Cleaver Street in the north-east corner, on the Kennington Park Road frontage, up towards Walcot Square and St Mary’s Gardens one street north, and across Kennington Road towards Kennington Cross. South of Kennington Lane, on Cardigan Street and Newburn Street, we are into SE11 5 and the stock changes: more purpose-built flats, fewer cornices, faster jobs. If your address is a few streets off that list, ring the office. We almost certainly cover it.

The square went up over sixty-five years, in batches, and the batches are not the same house.

Twelve feet up: the part of the clean nobody photographs

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does. When you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the words “clean” or “as new” against the plasterwork. That was true on the day. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares entry by entry, and anything materially worse than the check-in line, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable. You are being marked against a professional clean. In a house with drawing-room ceilings at around twelve feet, most of the surface being marked is over your head.

Original cornicing collects dust in the undercut, where the moulding turns back on itself. From the floor it reads as shadow. Under a torch held at a low angle from a ladder, which is exactly what a clerk does, it reads as two years of neglect. We use an extending pole with a soft-bristle head for the reach, and we go up the ladder for the close work, because dragging a vacuum brush across old lime plaster chips it and a chip is damage, not dirt. Ceiling roses get done in stages, centre outwards. Picture rails and dado, where the principal rooms still have them, get hand-wiped rather than swept.

The other two time sinks are underfoot and in the chimney breast. A lot of these houses kept original block parquet, and a wet mop strips the wax and leaves a dull patch that photographs badly. The cast-iron register grates, some with painted tile cheeks, need a soft brush and nothing else; spray pits the iron and lifts the glaze, and then you are arguing about damage rather than dust. Conservation-area stock is slower per square foot than a new-build. We price it on the time it actually takes.

The licence in your landlord’s drawer changes who inspects you

Kennington is inside the Lambeth selective licensing scheme. Phase 2 of that scheme started on 1 September 2025 and brought in nineteen further wards, Kennington among them, on top of the four Streatham wards that came in a year earlier. Only Vauxhall and Waterloo & South Bank sit outside it. From 1 April 2026 the licence costs £1,025 per property, split £717.50 for Part A and £307.50 for Part B. Cleaver Square, Walcot Square, Bowden Street, Cleaver Street and most of the listed terraces around them sit in that ward, so most single-household lets here now need a licence.

That fee is not your problem. The consequence is. A licence creates a record the council can refer back to, which makes the licence-holder more careful about condition than a landlord on an unlicensed single let ever needed to be. On a converted house it also widens the walk. Communal stairs, the hallway carpet, the basement steps, the banister and spindles, the front area behind the railings: all of it gets looked at, and on a licensed conversion the licence-holder has standing to raise it.

We clean common parts as standard rooms in the quote. Not as an extra.

What 1 May 2026 did to the Kennington move-out calendar

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault eviction is gone, and every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a rolling periodic tenancy, so a tenant gives two months’ notice whenever it suits rather than waiting for a fixed term to expire.

Here is the part people get wrong. Your cleaning obligation did not move an inch. The check-in benchmark is the same, the deposit rules are the same, and nobody can make professional cleaning a contractual condition now any more than they could in April. What changed is timing, and timing is the thing that bites around here.

Kennington already churned. It is close in, it is full of one and two-year professional lets, and the listed houses on the square turn over with postings and job moves rather than on a tidy academic cycle. Give everyone a rolling exit and the move-outs spread out and get less predictable, which sounds like it should ease the month-end pile-up and does not, because the pile-up was never really about fixed terms. Book earlier than you used to. That is the whole practical lesson.

Section 21 going did not change what you have to clean. It changed when you find out you need to.

Why the shower screen fails before the oven does

Everyone worries about the oven. The oven is the easy part, because it is obvious and it either looks stripped or it does not. Scale is the sly one. Thames Water publishes its hardness bands: 200 to 300 mg/l of calcium carbonate is hard, anything over 300 is very hard, and the company states flatly that all the water in its region is hard, because it has run through chalk on the way to your tap. Around the square that means calcium climbs back onto a shower head inside a fortnight of a clean.

So the descale is not one job at the end. Shower head, screen and its runner, tap bases and spouts, the kettle element, the washing-machine drawer and the rubber door gasket where grey scale sits, the loo rim under the lip: weak acid, worked in, rinsed twice, then chrome polished dry afterwards as a separate pass. Descaling and polishing are different steps and doing them together leaves a bloom the clerk will call dirt.

One quirk worth knowing on the older houses. Where a bathroom has been fitted into a return or a half-landing, the extractor is usually undersized for the room volume, so the tiles stay damp longer and the grout picks up scale and mildew faster than the same grout would in a modern flat. We brush grout by hand on the shower wall. It is dull work and it is where the marks are.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

People use four words for four different services and agents do not. So, plainly:

End of tenancy

The hand-back clean. Fixed price, agent-facing, measured against your check-in report, with the 57-point agent-approved checklist applied throughout. This is the one that gets your deposit back.

Deep clean

The same intensity, but for a home you are staying in. No inventory, no report, no deadline attached to a set of keys.

Regular cleaning

A recurring visit that keeps a place ticking over. Good maintenance. It will not pass a check-out on its own.

Domestic cleaning

The catch-all term agents and tenants use loosely for the two above. If somebody says “just a domestic clean” before a move-out, ask which they mean, because the difference is your deposit.

Kitchen

Oven stripped, racks soaked separately, inner door glass done because the gap between the panes gets tested first. Hob, extractor baffle and splashback degreased. Every cupboard and drawer inside, outside, on top, behind and underneath. Fridge and freezer defrosted, washed, seals scrubbed. Dishwasher filter pulled and the salt reservoir checked. Washing-machine drawer and gasket descaled. Sink, taps and waste descaled, then polished dry. Grout brushed. Skirtings, picture rails where present, switches and sockets wiped. Windows hand-wiped inside, frames and locks included. Bin washed inside and out. Floor last, once the dust has settled, finished dry.

Bathrooms

Bath, tray, screen and tiles, with the descale on the head and the screen runner rinsed twice. Loo bowl, rim, hinge, base and behind. Sink, taps, plug and overflow, chrome polished as its own pass. Mirror, cabinet, shaver socket, extractor grille. Grout scrubbed where the shower water lands. Towel rail and the radiator behind it. Original cast-iron radiators hand-wiped, back, fins and brackets, no spray. Floor mopped, edges by hand.

Bedrooms and living rooms

Wardrobes inside and out, runners and rails. Skirtings, picture rails and dado where the principal rooms still carry them. Cornicing on the pole with a soft head, close work off the ladder. Ceiling roses in stages. Register grates and painted tile cheeks with a soft brush only. Parquet dry-buffed, damp-passed, dry-buffed again. Light fittings, switches, sockets, thermostat. Doors both sides, tops, original brass furniture and hinges. Carpets vacuumed in two directions and marks spot-treated; full shampoo is an add-on. Behind beds, sofas and anything freestanding. Window sills, which on these houses hold more dust than anything else at eye level.

Throughout

Internal doors, frames and architraves. On a licensed conversion, the communal stairs, banister, spindles and the under-stair cupboard. Hallway and stairwell skirtings, and these front-to-back hallways are the most-inspected strip in any converted terrace here. Loft hatch where you can reach it. Inside glass on every window, frames wiped, locks dusted. Then a final walk with a torch in low light, cornice runs first, because daylight hides exactly the thing the clerk is going to find.

What it costs on a patch this small

Fixed prices, not hourly, and the same tiers we charge across the rest of the borough. A studio is £156. A one-bed, which around here usually means an upper-floor flat on Cleaver Street or a split on Bowden Street, is £207. A two-bed is £243. A three-bed is £339, and a whole listed terrace on the square, three storeys over a semi-basement, is a four-bed job at £425 rather than a three-bed one, because the storey count is what drives the hours. Where a full end of tenancy is overkill, a top-up or a partial, we work at £30 per hour per cleaner. No VAT on top, no fuel surcharge, and no premium for stair access to an upper-floor listed flat.

Add-ons sit on top of that and only if you want them. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted area. The single oven is already in the price; a double is £110 and a 90cm range is £114. Reach work on external glass at listed frontages we quote on site, because the front-area railings and the drop into the basement decide whether it is a ladder job or not.

Now the maths nobody runs until it is too late. The ONS housing figures for Lambeth put the average private rent in the borough at £2,527 in May 2026, up 5.9% on the £2,387 it was a year earlier, with the average house price at £559,000 in April 2026, and the listed terraces on this square trade a long way above that borough mean. Your deposit is a proportion of the rent. A failed check-out on a house at this end of Lambeth routinely puts more at risk in one line item, the carpets or the plasterwork, than the entire clean costs. Monster Cleaning Ltd has been doing this since 2014 (Companies House 9919639), we have 300+ letting agents on our books and we have recovered £1.2m in deposits for tenants.

A Bowden Street job from March

“Fourteen months in a two-bed raised-ground flat, me and my flatmate, both of us working shifts and neither of us with a clue about the parquet. We had been using a steam mop on it. Apparently that is the worst thing you can do. Monster sent two cleaners on a Tuesday, seven hours, and most of the argument was the floor: dry buff, a damp pass, another dry buff, and by the end the blocks had their colour back. They also got the scale off the shower screen runner, which I had given up on months ago. The clerk queried one skirting and that was it. Full deposit, nine days later.”
Priya, Bowden Street SE11 4, March 2026

Booking it, and the month-end squeeze in SE11

Three or four days’ notice is comfortable. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the address, the number of bedrooms, whether the property is furnished and when the keys go back, and we will price it on the call. If you have the check-in report to hand, send it. It tells us what you are being marked against, which is more useful than any description of the flat.

The last three working days of a month are the problem. Half of SE11 hands back at once, a listed terrace is a nine to eleven-hour job we cannot squeeze into a gap between two flats, and the honest answer some months is that we are full. So book on a provisional date and move it. We would rather shuffle a slot than not have one for you.

One local thing worth planning for. Cleaver Square is a residents’ parking square with a gravel centre and no loading bay, so the van goes on Bowden Street or Cleaver Street and the kit walks in. That costs twenty minutes at each end. It is in the price. It is not in the schedule if you tell us at nine in the morning that the keys are due at eleven.

Questions we get asked

Do I have to book a professional clean to get my deposit back?

No. Nobody can write professional cleaning into your tenancy as a condition, and you are free to do it yourself. The awkward bit is the benchmark. Your check-in report describes the flat on the day it had just been professionally cleaned, and the check-out clerk marks you against that description, line by line. On a listed Georgian house with twelve-foot ceilings, matching it with a mop and a borrowed step-ladder is genuinely hard.

What does an end of tenancy clean cost around Cleaver Square?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Full fixed prices, not hourly, with the 57-point agent-approved checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee included. Partial or odd-shaped jobs are £30 per hour per cleaner instead.

Is Cleaver Square priced higher because the houses are listed?

No. Same tiers as the rest of Lambeth. Listed work is slower per square foot than a new-build and we absorb that in the time we allow, not the price. Size is what moves the number, and a whole three-storey terrace with a basement is a four-bed job.

How long does a Cleaver Square house take?

A one-bed upper-floor flat on Cleaver Street or Bowden Street is five to six hours with two cleaners. A whole listed terrace, three storeys over a semi-basement, is closer to ten or eleven and we send three. High ceilings are the reason. Cornice runs are done from a ladder, in stages, and that will not go faster than it goes.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change what I have to clean?

Not a line of it. Section 21 went on 1 May 2026 and every assured shorthold tenancy in England converted to a periodic one. The cleaning standard, the check-in benchmark and the deposit rules are exactly as they were. What changed is timing, so book earlier than you would have last year.

My landlord has a Lambeth selective licence. Does that affect the check-out?

It affects who looks and how carefully. Kennington has been in the scheme since 1 September 2025, and a licence creates a paper trail the council can refer back to. The licence-holder walks the shared parts as well as your flat: communal stairs, hallway, basement steps, the front area behind the railings. We clean those as standard rooms. You are not paying twice.

Can you do anything about the limescale on the shower screen?

Yes, and early. Thames Water puts 200 to 300 mg/l of calcium carbonate in the hard band and anything above 300 in very hard, and says all the water in its region is hard. Scale builds fast here. Shower heads, screen runners, tap bases, kettle elements and the washing-machine drawer get a weak acid descale and two rinses.

The floors are original parquet. Will you mop them?

Not with a bucket. A wet mop lifts the wax off block parquet and leaves a dull patch the clerk will photograph. We dry-buff with a microfibre, take a barely damp pass over it, then dry-buff again. It is slower than mopping and it is the difference between a pass and a floor deduction.

What about the cast-iron fireplaces and the painted tiles?

Soft brush, no spray, no abrasive. Spray pits the iron and can lift the glaze on painted tile cheeks, and once that is done it is damage rather than dirt, which is a much worse conversation to have. Same on cast-iron radiators and vent grilles. Hand-wiped, dry.

Is carpet shampoo or oven cleaning included?

The oven is. Full strip, racks soaked separately, inner door glass done, because the gap between the panes is where the clerk looks first. Carpet shampoo is an add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted area. A double oven is £110, a 90cm range £114.

What happens if the clerk fails us anyway?

Tell us within 48 hours of the check-out and we come back and put it right at no cost. That is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and it is measured against the check-out report, not against an opinion. Send us the report. We work the flagged lines.

How much notice do you need for a Cleaver Square booking?

Three or four days is comfortable. The last three working days of any month are the squeeze, because half of SE11 hands back at once and a listed terrace is too long a job to slot into a gap. Ring as soon as you have a date, even a provisional one.