End of tenancy cleaning right across Convoys Wharf

The first thing an inventory clerk does in a Deptford flat is run a thumbnail down the kitchen taps, because the water here leaves a chalk crust that a quick wipe never shifts. That mark is a deduction, and the clerk has the move-in photos to prove it was not there before. We are a London end-of-tenancy crew working the SE8 streets around Convoys Wharf, the old Royal Dockyard site by the river, and we clean to the check-out report itself: 57 points, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover SE8 across Deptford and the Convoys Wharf riverside, plus the SE14 and SE4 edges at New Cross and Brockley. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lewisham.

The report that decides your deposit, written on day one

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote an inventory: every surface described, usually photographed, the kitchen and bathroom marked clean or as new because they had just been done. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything materially worse than the move-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean. That is why a mop and a free Sunday rarely gets you there, and it is the whole game on a Deptford hand-back.

The money is not abstract. On the SE8 DIY check-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a pattern: £80 to £120 on the oven, £70 to £150 on grout and scale, £60 to £100 for the gaps behind the appliances, £150 upward on carpets. Set that against a deposit on a two-bed off Evelyn Street and the maths makes itself. Most tenants only run the sum after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round. The first round is the cheap one to win.

Why is the clerk so exacting here? Because the deposit is real money the agent has to account for, so the inspection is genuinely adversarial and the clerk is paid to find faults rather than wave you through. That is not unfair. It means you turn up with evidence, not optimism. The law behind it is the deposit-protection rules in Housing Act 2004 s.214: your protected deposit has to come back inside ten days of an agreed figure, and any deduction has to be evidenced against that inventory.

Convoys Wharf as it actually stands in 2026

Let me be straight about the address, because the marketing runs ahead of the bricks. Convoys Wharf is an approved riverside regeneration of the former Deptford Dockyard, the naval yard Henry VIII founded in 1513, and later the Convoys newsprint wharf. Hutchison has held the 16-hectare site since 2008, and outline consent for roughly 3,500 homes was granted back in 2014. It is not a finished, lived-in development. As of 2026 the work on the ground is early: piling on the first residential plot, enabling work started on the Jetty plot by the river, the Grade II-listed Olympia Warehouse standing as the cast-iron slip cover it has been since the 1840s, and a marketing suite rather than tenants. The ten-year build has not really begun.

So when people ring us about “end-of-tenancy cleaning at Convoys Wharf”, what they almost always mean is a let in the SE8 streets that wrap around the site. That is the work we actually do, and there is plenty of it. The Pepys Estate sits right on the western edge, Aragon Tower converted to private flats above it. Deptford High Street and its Saturday market are a few minutes inland. The riverside new-builds at Deptford Landings, the old Timberyard ground between Pepys Park and Deptford Park, have been letting for a while. When the first Convoys Wharf homes are eventually handed over, near Sayes Court and what survives of John Evelyn’s old garden, we will clean them. For now the honest version is the useful one.

The marketing runs ahead of the bricks, so the honest version is the useful one.

What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it did not

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone. Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, so a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting out a fixed term.

The clean stayed exactly the same.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change. The check-in benchmark still applies. The deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing. Deptford was already a high-churn corner of Lewisham, full of one-year lets and shared professional households, and rolling notice makes move-outs more frequent and far less predictable. The dull, paying takeaway: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want will be gone if you wait for the last week.

Why your Deptford landlord needs a Lewisham licence

Most of Deptford sits inside Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme, which is not borough-wide despite how it is often described. It runs across three ward designations, and the Evelyn ward, the one that holds Convoys Wharf and the riverside, is in the second of them. The scheme started on 1 July 2024 and runs to 30 June 2029. A landlord letting to a single household or a pair of sharers in Evelyn needs a licence on the address, the fee is £640 in two instalments, and the penalty for letting without one runs to £30,000. You can check any address and read the conditions on Lewisham Council’s selective licensing page.

What that means for you as the tenant is narrower than it sounds. The licence is about the landlord and the condition of the building, the gas and electrical safety paperwork, overcrowding. It does not set the cleaning standard your deposit is judged against. That standard is the inventory the agent holds. So a licensed flat is not a flat you can hand back dirty: the clerk is still working from the move-in photos, licence or no licence.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every SE8 booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what Deptford clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of it goes wrong

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak in a tank, the door glass is split so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. That film is the single most-flagged oven fault on a hand-back. If the oven is the only thing the agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it on its own.

After the oven we do the rest of the room: hob rings and burners off and washed, gas in the terraced flats and induction in the Deptford Landings new-builds, each handled its own way. Extractor hood degreased inside and out, filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard inside and out. Fridge and freezer through once you have defrosted them. Appliances pulled so the gaps behind and under get done, then put back. The washing machine drum, the detergent drawer scrubbed, and the door seal, which is the first thing the clerk opens. Sink, taps and plughole descaled, because the chalk in this water never gives that a miss.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, the base, the cistern, the hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
• Shower screen both sides, tracks and the sealant bead
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they sit off the wall
• Extractor vent wiped, and the floor into the corners and under the basin

Bedrooms, living rooms and the rest

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, door frames, doors, handles. Light fittings, switches and the ceiling rose, which in an older Deptford conversion holds years of dust. Window sills, reveals and frames on the inside; the timber sliding sashes in the Victorian terraces want slow careful work, the way the casements in a new-build do not. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Hard floors washed with the right product for the material. Carpets hoovered, and where the tenancy writes in professional extraction the carpet cleaning add-on covers it on the same visit. Then the dull finish: sockets, intercom, internal doors both sides, cobwebs out of the ceiling corners, and a photographed before-and-after of every room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

What chalk-fed Thames water does to an SE8 bathroom

Deptford sits in London’s hard-water zone, and that one detail loses more deposits here than almost anything except the oven. The supply runs off chalk and limestone aquifers and carries calcium carbonate at around 293 parts per million, which is the hard-to-very-hard end of the scale, and you can verify the figure for SE8 on the Thames Water hardness page. 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 knows this. They run a thumbnail down the tap, they look at the shower screen edge-on against the light, they pull the head in close.

Scale that has set into chrome is not a quick job. In the period flats around Albury Street and the conservation streets there is often older or reproduction chrome that rules out the brute-force descalers a new Deptford Landings bathroom would shrug off. Grout is the other one, the line between a pass and a deduction more often than carpets are. We scrub it rather than wipe it, and 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.

That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument.

Specialist surfaces sit outside the scrub-and-go work. Engineered board in a riverside new-build, original boards in a terrace conversion, a tiled Victorian hallway: each takes its own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for.

Deptford stock: the flat changes street by street

SE8 is not one kind of housing, and one method does not pass all of it. The clerk is briefed on what is in front of them, so we are too.

The Victorian terraces and conversions

The streets running back from the high street and along toward New Cross are mostly two and three-storey terraces, a lot of them split into flats. Cramped rear extensions, original tiled halls, timber sliding sashes, and a kitchen that is either six months old or last touched decades ago. Long lets mean build-up in the places nobody cleaned between tenants: behind the cooker, under the fridge, into the grout of the hall tile. We win these on the slow, dull work, not on anything clever. The agents along Deptford High Street, Oliver Jaques and Franklyn James among them, send the strictest clerks at exactly those spots.

The Pepys Estate and the ex-council blocks

On the western edge by the river sits the Pepys Estate, the 1,500-home scheme the Greater London Council finished in the early 1970s, with Aragon Tower the point block that was sold off and converted to private flats. A lot of these are sublet now. They tend to be solidly built with simple finishes, so the deductions cluster on the kitchen and the bathroom rather than on delicate surfaces, and the parking is easier than the terraces.

The riverside new-builds and what is coming

Then the new stock: Deptford Landings on the old Timberyard ground, the blocks at Cedarwood Square and Larchwood Place between Pepys Park and Deptford Park, engineered floors, integrated appliances, floor-to-ceiling glazing facing the water. The inventory on these is tighter and the glass is a real item, because river air leaves a fine film on south-facing panes across a year’s let. The Convoys Wharf flats will join this band when they are eventually built and let, near Sayes Court. We clean across the whole of it, and the boroughs next door when a tenancy straddles a line: New Cross, Brockley, Greenwich and Surrey Quays across the water.

Not sure which postcode or which side of a boundary you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the address and we will tell you in about ten seconds.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

Three different cleans get muddled, and it is worth booking the right one.

End-of-tenancy clean

Built to pass the inventory and get a deposit back, against the letting-agent benchmark, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing maintenance, from £22 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.

Deptford runs at our standard London pricing: £30 per hour per cleaner, with kit, products and travel inside the area included. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom or £43 a living room, £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. A single oven is £77, a double £110, a 90cm range £114. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or somewhere not deep-cleaned in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after.

Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect five weeks of rent held in a scheme is not really a decision. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags a cleaning issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Our pass rate sits near a 97% first-time pass rate against agent inspections, but the guarantee is the point. There is a reason agents around here know us. 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.

A flat off Deptford High Street, last month

“I had a three-year let in a converted terrace just off the high street, two of us sharing, and we left it looking fine to our eyes. The agent’s clerk went straight for the bathroom and the kitchen taps, where the scale had built up worse than I realised, and the gap behind the cooker neither of us had moved in three years. Monster sent two cleaners for most of a day, stripped the oven, took the scale off the chrome and did the hall tile. The clerk passed it and the full deposit came back inside a fortnight. I had braced for losing a chunk of it.”
Tomasz, Deptford SE8, May 2026

That is a fair example of the SE8 pattern: a long share in a terrace conversion, scale nobody had kept on top of, an oven left too long, and an agent who checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake. It usually does. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, which is the part most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Questions we get asked

How much is end-of-tenancy cleaning in Deptford?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed flat or terrace conversion £243, a three-bed £339, and a four-bed £425. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom or £43 a living room, £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. A single oven on its own is £77, a double £110. Those are full prices with kit, products and travel included, and the rate is £30 per hour per cleaner if you would rather work to a time budget.

Can you actually clean a flat at Convoys Wharf?

When there are homes there to clean, yes. As of 2026 Convoys Wharf is an approved scheme in its early stages: piling and enabling work, the listed Olympia Warehouse retained, a marketing suite by the jetty, but no occupied flats yet. What we clean today is the lets in the SE8 streets around the site, Deptford and the riverside, and we will cover the development itself once the first homes are handed over.

How long does a Deptford clean take?

A two-bed flat takes a two-cleaner crew about five to six hours from arrival to written sign-off. A three-bed terrace runs to six or eight. The slowest single items are the oven and, in the riverside new-builds, the floor-to-ceiling glazing, so a flat with a lot of glass takes longer than a same-size terrace.

Does Lewisham selective licensing apply in Deptford?

For most addresses, yes. The Evelyn ward, which covers Convoys Wharf and the riverside, is in Designation 2 of Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme. It started on 1 July 2024 and runs to 30 June 2029, the landlord fee is £640 in two instalments, and letting without a licence can cost up to £30,000. The scheme is not borough-wide, so check the exact address on the council’s postcode tool. The licence is the landlord’s responsibility and does not set the cleaning standard your deposit is judged against.

Has the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 changed the deposit process?

Not the deduction mechanism. Section 21 no-fault evictions have gone since the first phase came in on 1 May 2026, and tenancies are now periodic, but the deposit-protection rules under Housing Act 2004 s.214 are unchanged. Your protected deposit still has to come back inside ten days of an agreed figure, and any deduction still has to be evidenced against the inventory. The real effect locally is timing: more frequent, less predictable move-outs.

What is the water like, and does it matter for the clean?

It is hard. The Thames Water supply across SE8 runs off chalk at around 293 parts per million calcium carbonate, which sets scale on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints across a tenancy. A cloth does nothing to it. We descale the chrome with the right product for the finish, gently on older or reproduction chrome in the period flats, and the shower screen and tiles are usually where a clerk looks first in this part of London.

Do you clean the new-build flats at Deptford Landings and the riverside blocks?

Yes. The riverside new-builds at Deptford Landings, Cedarwood Square and Larchwood Place have engineered floors, integrated appliances and a lot of glazing, and the inventory on them is tight. We clean the inner glass on both faces and the outer where it is reachable from inside or a balcony, use a wood-safe product on engineered floors rather than steam, and work to the developer spec where the agent sends it.

What about a flat on the Pepys Estate or in Aragon Tower?

We clean across the Pepys Estate, including the converted private flats in Aragon Tower. The blocks are solidly built with plain finishes, so the deductions tend to cluster on the kitchen and bathroom rather than on delicate surfaces, and access and parking are usually easier than on the terraced streets.

Do you handle the period terraces with original features?

Yes. The converted terraces around the high street and toward New Cross have timber sliding sashes, original boards and tiled halls. We use appropriate products on those and we do not put anything aggressive where the inventory lists original detail. The slow hand-work on the sash boxes and the hall tile is where these check-outs are won.

Will you do a same-day clean if my hand-back has been brought forward?

Sometimes, if we have crew slack on the day. Deptford hand-backs cluster on Fridays and Mondays around the agent’s inventory walk, so a same-day on a Friday at month-end is unlikely. Midweek slots have the most short-notice availability. Ring and we will tell you straight what is open.

Do you provide a deposit-back guarantee?

We guarantee the clean, not the deposit. The 48-hour re-clean guarantee means that if the clerk flags a cleaning issue on their first walk and the agent emails us inside 48 hours of our written sign-off, we come back free. Across the 300+ letting agents we work with in London, we run a 97% first-time pass rate against agent inspections and have helped recover £1.2m in deposits for tenants.

What if my landlord disputes the clean after a re-clean?

Escalate to the deposit scheme adjudication: TDS, DPS or mydeposits. Our invoice, dated photo report and re-clean record are admissible evidence, and a tenant with a complete professional-clean paper trail rarely loses. Shelter’s guidance walks through the steps.

Does the flat need to be empty?

Fully empty is strongly preferred. Furniture left behind blocks access and creates uncertainty at the check-out. A single piece left for the next tenant can be worked around, but the more that stays, the less complete the clean can be.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, property size, check-out date, any known problem areas, that is the lot. Out of hours, send us a message or email [email protected] and someone calls you back. A couple of photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen the quote. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, working London since 2014, and if your Deptford check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Convoys Wharf

Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Convoys Wharf, oven cleaning in Convoys Wharf and domestic cleaning in Convoys Wharf.