An arms town on the river Cray
The greyhound track off Stadium Way ran its last meeting on 19 January 2025, and Crayford lost the floodlit Saturday nights it had kept going since the new stadium opened in 1986. The dogs are gone, but the shape of the town they sat in has not changed. The River Cray still runs through Crayford Gardens in the centre, the way it has since the settlement grew up around a ford on it, and the old Vickers connection still explains most of what you rent here.
That history matters to a tenant for one plain reason. Vickers took over the gun and ammunition works on the marshes in 1897, became the dominant employer, built military aeroplanes and armaments through two wars, and put up rows of workers’ housing, a theatre and a canteen close to the workshops. The canteen is now Crayford Town Hall. The terraces and interwar houses are now the lettings stock whose deposit you are trying to get back, and they clean nothing like a new-build flat.
An end of tenancy clean is the deep, top-to-bottom clean a landlord or letting agent expects when a tenancy ends, judged against the check-in inventory rather than against everyday tidiness. It is the single biggest reason DA1 deposits get docked. Get it right and the money comes back in full. Get it wrong and the agent has fair grounds to keep part of it.
This page is the long version, written for Crayford. What we clean, what it costs, how Bexley’s licensing actually works on this side of the borough, and how to argue a cleaning charge if one ever lands on you.
The terraces and interwar houses are now the lettings stock whose deposit you are trying to get back, and they clean nothing like a new-build flat.
The stock Vickers left behind
The classic Crayford rental is an interwar terrace or a small semi, often one of the streets put up for the works between the wars, and it has a familiar set of weak spots when the clerk arrives. Knowing them ahead of time is half the job.
The kitchen comes first, every time. These houses were not built for the cookers and units people fit now, so you get a patchwork of older cabinets and newer ones, and the narrow gap beside a freestanding cooker is where grease and crumbs collect for a year. A clerk opens the oven door and checks the inside of the glass, the racks and the grill pan. A wiped hob does not pass. A degreased one does. The oven is the most argued-over single item on any check-out we attend, and it is rarely close.
Bathrooms are next. Crayford sits on the hard-water belt that runs across north-west Kent and the Cray valley, so scale builds fast on the taps, the shower screen and the rim of the bath, and it comes back quicker here than a tenant expects. We clear the limescale properly. A domestic wipe smears it and leaves the cloudy film a clerk spots in a second.
Then the windows. A lot of these houses kept their original bay fronts, with deep reveals and wide sills that hold dust along the joints, and the timber frames where they survive flake paint into the corners. We clean the glass and the frames inside as part of the standard job. The outside is a separate add-on if your inventory asks for it, because reaching the upstairs bays safely needs a pole or a ladder. A handful of the older houses still have their first-floor sash windows, and the cords and runners on a sash trap grime that a fast pass slides over.
The one people forget is the floor edges. Carpet gets hoovered down the middle, but the skirting boards, the gripper rods at the room edges and the dust line where the carpet meets the wall are all graded. Hard floors get mopped into the corners as well as across the open space. None of this is difficult. It is slow, and slow is the thing tenants run out of on the day, which is the whole reason a professional clean exists at all.
Closer to the river, around Barnes Cray and the old model cottages near the works, the houses are smaller and the turnover quicker. The newer flats off the High Street and behind Tower Retail Park clean faster but get graded just as hard. We size the clean to the actual home, which is why we band the price by bedroom count rather than running an hourly meter.
What it costs, and how to book
We price by the size of the home, which is the fairer way round, because a thorough clean of a one-bed flat near the station should not cost what a four-bed house out towards Hall Place does. The price is fixed before we arrive. There is no hourly clock ticking while someone scrubs a grill pan.
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. Those are the full end of tenancy figures, kit and cleaning products included, and they are what you actually pay. We do not quote a teaser rate and bolt the extras on at the door.
If your place genuinely needs a person for a few hours rather than a full move-out clean, we also work by the hour at £30 per cleaner, which suits a part-clean or a top-up. Most check-out jobs, though, are the banded clean.
The add-ons are priced on their own, so you pay only for what your inventory needs. A hot-water-extraction deep carpet clean is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat done in one go. A dedicated deep oven clean is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. Booking the carpet or oven work alongside the main clean is almost always cheaper than failing the check-out and paying the landlord’s own contractor afterwards.
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected], give us the postcode, the number of bedrooms and your check-out date, and we will give you a fixed price and a slot. We clean seven days a week, which matters when a tenancy ends on a Sunday and the agent wants the keys back on Monday morning. A note on access, because Crayford has its quirks. The High Street is partly one-way and parking on it is tight, so for a flat above the shops tell us what the loading is like and we will plan around it. Out by the retail parks and the stadium site there is more room for the van. Leave the utilities connected and clear your belongings out first; we bring everything else.
Room by room: what we actually clean
Our end of tenancy clean is a fixed scope, not an hourly visit. The team stays until the 57-point checklist is signed off, so a stubborn oven never means a half-done bathroom. Here is what that scope means in practice.
Across every room we dust and wipe the surfaces, clear cobwebs from the corners and ceiling lines, clean the light switches, sockets, door frames and skirting boards, and clean inside and out of each cupboard and wardrobe once it is empty. Carpets are hoovered through, edges included. Hard floors are vacuumed and then mopped.
In the kitchen we degrease the oven inside and out, clean the hob and the extractor, wipe the fronts and insides of the units, descale and polish the sink and taps, and clean behind and around the freestanding appliances we can move safely. The fridge and freezer are cleaned inside once they are switched off and emptied.
In the bathroom we descale and sanitise the toilet, basin, bath and shower, clean the screen or door, scrub the tile grout, polish the taps and the mirror, and clear scale from anywhere the hard water has reached. We treat the limescale rather than smearing it about, which is usually the difference between a pass and a return visit.
Two things we need from you and from the property. The utilities have to be on, because we cannot run hot water or test an oven without power and a water supply. And the home needs to be empty of your things, since we clean what we can reach, not around a stacked spare room. Past that, we bring all the kit and the cleaning products ourselves, at no extra charge, and the team works the list top to bottom so nothing gets skipped because the clock ran down.
Some jobs want more than the standard scope, and it costs less to add that at the booking than to fail and come back. Carpets with set-in marks want the extraction machine rather than a hoover. A heavily caked oven, the sort a landlord photographs for the file, is better booked as the dedicated oven clean. Tired sofas and mattresses can be lifted with an upholstery treatment, and exterior glass can go on where the inventory demands it.
Why a weekend scrub does not pass
Plenty of Crayford tenants clean hard before they leave and still lose money. It is not laziness. It is that a clerk grades to a different standard, and a couple of hours with a mop on moving morning cannot reach it.
The check-in inventory is the reason. When you moved in, the property had usually just been cleaned professionally, photographed and logged that way. The clerk at the end compares your work against that baseline, not against a fair lived-in tidy. So the bar is not “clean”, it is “as clean as the day those photos were taken”, which is a high bar after a year in the place.
Then there is the kit. A professional oven clean uses dip tanks and proper degreasers on the racks and trays, which is why the result beats a supermarket spray and an hour of effort. Hard-water scale needs the right product and time to work, not force. The window reveals and the tops of the doors need a step and a method, not a stretch and a guess. Most tenants do not own the gear, and hiring it for a single move costs more than booking the job out.
And there is the clock, which beats everyone. On the day a tenancy ends you are loading a van, chasing a deposit, handing back keys and very likely starting a new tenancy across town, so the clean is the thing that gets squeezed, and a squeezed clean is exactly what a clerk is trained to catch. That pressure is why so many of our Crayford calls come in late the night before a check-out, from someone who has looked at the oven and the bathroom and run the numbers on the hours left.
None of this means a tenant cannot reach the standard alone. It means doing it properly takes a full day, the right products and a method that matches how the place is graded, and for the price of one banded clean most people decide their day is better spent on the move.
The bar is not “clean”, it is “as clean as the day those photos were taken”, which is a high bar after a year in the place.
The clerk’s walk through a Crayford let
It helps to know what the person grading your clean is actually looking at, because it is more specific than most tenants imagine. On a Crayford let the check-out is usually done by an independent inventory clerk the agent books, working through the property with the check-in report open beside them.
In the kitchen they open the oven and look at the inside of the door glass, the racks and the grill pan, then check behind and under the cooker, the seals on the fridge, the inside of the extractor and the underside of the wall units. The kitchen on its own accounts for a large share of the cleaning notes we see written up. In the bathroom they run a finger along the grout, check the shower screen for scale, look under the rim of the toilet and behind the basin pedestal, and test the taps for water spotting.
Then they go up. The window reveals, the tops of the bay frames, the runners on any older sash windows, the picture rails and the tops of the doors are all dust traps a quick pass leaves alone, and a clerk who knows the interwar stock around Crayford knows exactly where to put their hand. Skirting boards, light switches, the backs of radiators and the insides of fitted wardrobes finish the walk.
The report comes back room by room, each line graded and often photographed, and any line that has slipped against the check-in is a candidate for a deduction. Our 57-point checklist is built to mirror that walk almost item for item, which is why a clean done to it tends to come back clear. We have spent more than a decade on the books of 300+ letting agents learning what their clerks flag, and the checklist is the distilled version of all that.
Licensing in Bexley if you rent in Crayford
If you rent in Crayford, here is the licensing position in plain terms. Most tenants here are not in a licensed property, and it is worth knowing why before you move, because it sets who is responsible for what when a tenancy ends.
The London Borough of Bexley runs mandatory HMO licensing across the whole borough. That is the national rule: any house in multiple occupation with five or more people from two or more households must be licensed, Crayford included. On top of that, the council brought in a selective licensing scheme, but it covers one ward only, Belvedere, which sits up by the Thames in the far north of the borough. That scheme runs from 13 January 2025 to 12 January 2030 and catches ordinary single-family lets within that one ward.
Crayford is nowhere near it. The town is at the eastern edge of the borough on the Cray, a good few miles south of Belvedere, and Bexley operates no additional licensing scheme anywhere. So a standard flat or house let in DA1 is licensed only if it is a larger HMO. For most Crayford tenants that means the landlord’s duties are the everyday ones, not the extra conditions a selective licence loads on.
Why did the scheme land on Belvedere and not on Crayford? Because the council picked the ward with the highest share of private renting, the worst housing hazards and a concentration of antisocial behaviour, which are the standard legal grounds for a targeted scheme. That is simply not Crayford’s profile. The reasoning tells you what selective licensing is for, and why the honest answer for most of DA1 is that it does not apply to you.
If your Crayford home genuinely is a house in multiple occupation, with five or more people from more than one household sharing, then the mandatory licence does apply and your landlord must hold one whatever the ward. In that case the council can set conditions on the property’s condition, and a thorough end of tenancy clean keeps the place inside those conditions when one sharer moves out and the room turns over.
Why does any of this matter for your deposit? In a licensed property the council can set standards a landlord has to meet, which can take in condition at the end of a tenancy. Outside the schemes, the standard you are held to is whatever your tenancy agreement and the check-in inventory set, and that inventory is the document that decides a cleaning charge. The wider rules tightened under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which reshaped tenancy types and the grounds for possession, but the basic mechanics of a cleaning deduction did not move: it still comes down to the inventory and the evidence on each side.
Your deposit, and pushing back on a charge
Your deposit is not sitting in the landlord’s account. On an assured shorthold tenancy the law requires it to be held in a government-approved tenancy deposit protection scheme, and you should have been told which one within 30 days of paying it. That protection is what gives you a free route to challenge a deduction you think is unfair.
If a cleaning charge lands at the end of your Crayford tenancy, do not just pay it, and do not dig in either. Ask the landlord or agent for the deduction in writing, with the amount and the reason, plus a copy of the check-out report. Then set that report against your check-in inventory. A landlord can charge to bring the property back to its move-in condition, but not for fair wear and tear, the ordinary ageing any home goes through over a tenancy. Citizens Advice sets out where that line falls and what counts as a reasonable deduction.
If you cannot agree, the deposit scheme’s free dispute service will adjudicate, and it decides on evidence. This is where a professional clean earns its keep twice over. We hand you a dated invoice and a record of the 57-point checklist we worked through, which is exactly the kind of evidence an adjudicator weighs against a vague claim that the property was left dirty. And on the rare occasion a clerk does flag our work, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we come back and put it right inside three days, free, before any dispute even needs to start. With a 97% first-time pass rate it seldom comes to that, but the safety net is there.
Make the claim promptly. Shelter explains how to ask for the deposit back and how the scheme steps in if a landlord goes quiet, and the schemes generally expect a dispute to be raised within a few months of the tenancy ending, so the worst move is to sit on it. One number worth holding onto while you weigh it up: across our work we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. A clean that costs £243 to protect a £1,800 deposit is not really a cost. It is insurance.
Who we clean for around DA1
Most of our Crayford work sits in a band either side of the High Street and the river, from the old town centre out towards the retail parks on one side and Barnes Cray on the other. The jobs split three ways. Tenants leaving a let and chasing the full deposit are the bulk of it. Then landlords turning a property round between tenancies, often through one of the local agents. And a steady trickle of people who have already started the clean, run out of road, and rung us the night before the check-out.
The trains set the rhythm of the moves we do here. Crayford station opened in 1866 and sits in Zone 6 on the North Kent line, with Southeastern running west to London Charing Cross and Cannon Street and east to Dartford and Gravesend. A lot of the tenants we clean for commute on that line, so their tenancies tend to end on a Friday and the check-out lands first thing Monday. The 492 bus threads through to Bluewater one way and Sidcup the other, which is how plenty of our clients reach a flat without a car, and the A2 and A206 carry the rest. That commuter pattern is why our diary around Crayford clusters at month-ends and the back half of the week.
If your let sits over the boundary, the same team covers the neighbouring patches. We run the identical service in Bexleyheath, a short way west along the A207, in Barnehurst just to the north, and down towards the marshes in Slade Green. The wider end of tenancy cleaning across the Bexley borough hub lists the rest, so if you are moving within the borough rather than out of it, the same standard follows you.
One thing that does set Crayford apart is the history a tenant lives among. Hall Place, the Tudor house Sir John Champneis built around 1537, stands alongside the same River Cray a mile upstream, with its topiary gardens and silk works open to the public, and a fair few of the homes we clean look out over the green corridor the river cuts through the town. It is a reminder that the stock here is old, and old stock is exactly what rewards a clean done to a list rather than by eye.
Plain-English terms for your check-out
End-of-tenancy paperwork is full of jargon that only surfaces when your deposit is on the line. A few definitions that save arguments later.
- Check-in inventory
- The document, usually with photographs, that records the property’s condition and cleanliness at the start of your tenancy. It is the benchmark every check-out is judged against, so a row over cleaning is really a row about this report.
- Check-out report
- The inspection done when you leave, often by an independent inventory clerk, comparing the property now against the check-in. The cleaning grades on this report are what trigger a deduction.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual, expected ageing of a home through normal living, such as lightly worn carpet or faded paint. A landlord cannot charge you for it, and Citizens Advice explains how it differs from damage.
- Mandatory HMO licence
- The borough-wide licence a landlord must hold for a house in multiple occupation let to five or more people from two or more households. It applies in Crayford as it does everywhere in Bexley.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme requiring most private lets in a designated area to hold a licence. In Bexley it covers the Belvedere ward only, not Crayford.
Questions Crayford tenants ask
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Crayford?
It depends on the size of the home, not the hours worked. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. The price is fixed before we arrive and includes all the kit and cleaning products.
Do you guarantee I will pass the check-out inspection?
We hold a 97% first-time pass rate and back every clean with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the inventory clerk or agent flags our work inside that window, we return and put it right at no charge, before any deposit dispute needs to start.
What is the difference between an end of tenancy clean and a regular clean?
A regular clean keeps a lived-in home tidy. An end of tenancy clean is a deep clean measured against your check-in inventory, covering the oven, grout, window frames and skirting that a check-out actually grades. We follow a 57-point checklist to hit that standard.
Is my rented home in Crayford covered by selective licensing?
Almost certainly not. Bexley’s selective licensing scheme covers the Belvedere ward only, up by the Thames in the north of the borough, and the council runs no additional HMO scheme. A standard Crayford let needs a licence only if it is a larger house in multiple occupation under the mandatory rules.
Does the clean include cleaning the oven?
Yes. Degreasing the oven inside and out is part of the standard end of tenancy scope. If the oven is heavily caked, the kind a landlord photographs, a dedicated deep oven clean at £77 for a single, £110 for a double or £114 for a range gives a deeper result.
Do you clean carpets as well?
We hoover all carpets as part of the clean, edges included. For set-in marks we add hot-water-extraction carpet cleaning at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat done together.
Will you clean the outside of the windows?
Inside glass and window frames are included as standard. Exterior glass is a separate add-on, because the bay windows on these interwar houses need a pole or ladder to reach safely. Tell us if your inventory requires clean exterior windows and we will bring the right kit.
How long does an end of tenancy clean take?
It depends on the size and state of the property, but a one or two-bed flat is usually a half day and a larger house can take most of a day. Because the price is banded rather than hourly, the team stays until the 57-point checklist is complete.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
No, as long as we can get access. Many Crayford tenants leave a key with the agent or a neighbour. We just need the utilities left on and your belongings cleared out so we can reach everything.
Can you clean at the weekend?
Yes. We work seven days a week, which helps when a tenancy ends on a Saturday or Sunday and the keys are due back the next morning. Slots fill quickly around month-end, so it is worth calling early.
What if my landlord still tries to charge me for cleaning?
Ask for the deduction and the check-out report in writing, then compare it with your check-in inventory. Our dated invoice and checklist record are strong evidence in a deposit scheme dispute, and the scheme’s free adjudication service decides on exactly that kind of evidence.
Do you cover the streets near Crayford station and Barnes Cray?
Yes. We clean right across DA1, from the flats above the High Street to the terraces around Barnes Cray and out towards Slade Green. Tell us the postcode when you call and we will confirm the slot and the price.
How do I book and how quickly can you come?
Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your postcode, bedroom count and check-out date. We can often fit in next-day cleans around Crayford, though moving-day Fridays and weekends fill quickly, so the earlier you book the better.