End of tenancy cleaning in and around Dalston Square

On a Dalston Square check-out the clerk’s torch goes to the fridge seal before it goes anywhere else. New-build kitchens keep their dirt behind furniture doors, and that is exactly where the deductions sit. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd (Companies House 9919639), and we have cleaned end of tenancy across the towers above Dalston Junction since 2014. A studio here is £156 and a three-bed £339, or £30 per hour per cleaner if you only want part of the job done. Every clean carries our 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a fixed price.

Last updated July 2026. We cover E8 3FP, E8 3BQ, E8 3DT and E8 3GP across Dalston Square, the plaza and the Kingsland Road frontage either side of it. This page sits inside the Hackney directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Hackney.

The concierge desk sees your clean before the clerk does

Dalston Square runs a 24-hour concierge. That single fact is the practical difference between cleaning here and cleaning a converted terrace three streets west, and it shapes the entire job before anyone picks up a cloth. Our team cannot pull up outside and carry kit through a front door. They sign in, they get directed, and they move machines through a shared lobby while other residents are using it.

So we ask four things on the phone. Which tower. Which floor. Whether the lift needs booking for kit. And who is holding the keys on the day.

That last one catches people out more than anything else on this development. In a street property the tenant hands over a key and that is the end of it. Here the key might sit with you, with the block manager, or with the letting agent, and on a bad morning all three assume one of the others has it while our team stands in the lobby burning an hour of your slot.

Here the key might sit with you, with the block manager, or with the letting agent, and on a bad morning all three assume one of the others has it while our team stands in the lobby burning an hour of your slot.

Lift access is the other one. Buildings of this size usually have rules about when kit travels in a passenger lift and whether a goods lift needs reserving. We are not going to pretend we know your block’s current rules better than your block manager does, because those rules change and we would rather ask than guess. Check with them, tell us what they said, and we will build the start time around it.

Collins, Gaumont, Dunbar, Labyrinth: what changes as you go up

Dalston Square is a Barratt London scheme of roughly 530 flats, built on land the London Development Agency assembled with Hackney Council and Transport for London, wrapped around a public plaza with the Dalston C. L. R. James Library on it. The station entrance is part of the development. You can be on an Overground train ninety seconds after your front door shuts, which is lovely to live with and slightly awkward to clean around, because there is no quiet loading time on a square that sits on top of a station.

The towers we work most are Collins, Gaumont, Dunbar and Labyrinth. Gaumont takes its name from the cinema that stood here before any of this did. Stock is mostly one, two and three-bed flats, with duplexes in the mix and studios at the smaller end. Nothing here is period. There are no sash windows, no cornices, no chimney breasts and no floorboard gaps, and any cleaner quoting you for that vocabulary has not been inside the building.

What you get instead: floor-to-ceiling glazing, engineered timber or tile through the living space, fitted wardrobes, bright chrome fittings, and a kitchen where nearly every appliance hides behind a furniture door. Residents share a gym and communal roof terraces. Higher floors bring more glass and more light, which sounds like a bonus until check-out day, when light is simply a better torch. A second-floor flat and a fifteenth-floor flat can have identical layouts and completely different clean times, purely because of what the sun shows on the glass.

Compact does not mean quick.

Flats on this development are efficient with their space, so a two-bed here often has less floor than a two-bed in a De Beauvoir conversion. Clerks still take the same time over it, because the surfaces that eat the hours are the seals, the runners, the tracks and the glass rather than the square metres. We name the neighbouring patches we work in plain prose here on purpose: Dalston Junction, Dalston Kingsland, De Beauvoir, Haggerston and London Fields all have their own pages, and the grid below this article will take you to them.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a Dalston move-out

Section 21 is gone. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 commenced its first phase on 1 May 2026, assured shortholds converted to rolling periodic tenancies, and the no-fault route out disappeared with them.

Here is the part that matters to you, and it is duller than the headlines suggested. Your cleaning obligation did not change. Not a word of it. What changed is timing and churn: tenancies end on notice rather than on a date everyone diarised twelve months ago, which means move-outs bunch up unpredictably and inventory clerks are busier at short notice than they used to be. The knock-on for cleaning is availability, not standard.

The deposit rules sit where they always did. Five weeks’ rent is the cap for most lets, the money must be in one of the government-backed protection schemes, and the check-out report is what any dispute gets argued on. Hackney’s average private rent was £2,622 a month in May 2026, up 2.8% on the year from £2,550, according to ONS local rent data for Hackney. On a Square two-bed sitting above that borough average, a five-week deposit is comfortably over £3,000 of your money resting on how the flat photographs on one Friday morning.

The other date worth knowing is the licensing one. Hackney’s selective licensing scheme started on 1 May 2026 and runs to 30 April 2031, covering seventeen wards, and Dalston ward takes in the Square. The fee is £925, with £100 off for accredited landlords, per Hackney Council property licensing. That is your landlord’s paperwork rather than yours. It reaches you second-hand, because a licensed let carries a documented trail and documented lets get walked that bit more carefully.

Integrated appliances are where new-build cleans quietly fail

Ask anyone who walks inventories in E8 which line fails most on a modern flat and you will not hear “the floor”. You will hear the kitchen, and inside the kitchen you will hear seals.

An integrated fridge sits behind a furniture door on a hinge, which means the tenant almost never sees its top, its sides, its plinth gap or the fold of its door seal. Two years of that adds up. The seal is a concertina of soft rubber with a dozen creases in it, every crease holds spill residue, and the clerk knows precisely where to point the torch because it is the same place in every flat they walk. We pull the appliance forward where the door allows, defrost it properly rather than hurrying it with hot water, and work every fold of that seal by hand.

The seal is a concertina of soft rubber with a dozen creases in it, every crease holds spill residue, and the clerk knows precisely where to point the torch because it is the same place in every flat they walk.

The extractor is the second one. Ducted runs above these hobs get hot on a family lease and the baffle filter loads up with a grease film that a dishwasher cycle will not shift on its own. It comes out, it soaks, it goes back in clean. The canopy interior gets scrubbed while the filter is out, which is the only sensible time to do it.

Induction hobs need a word of their own. A proper scraper and a dwell will lift burnt sugar and pan haze off the glass and leave it looking close to new, but scratches are not dirt and no product removes them. If your hob is scratched, we will tell you that on the day rather than charge you for a miracle. That is a wear discussion with your landlord.

Then the water. Thames Water pulls this part of London off chalk aquifers and treats its whole supply region as hard, which you can read in Thames Water hard water guidance. The Square is bright chrome throughout: shower screen runners, mixer bases, kettle elements, towel rails. Skip the drying step for a fortnight and a chalky bloom sets in that photographs beautifully under a clerk’s torch and not at all in daylight. Limescale of that kind wants a soak and a dwell and then a polish dry. It does not want scouring, because scoured chrome is its own deduction and it is permanent.

Glass is last and it is the one people underestimate. Floor-to-ceiling panels are cleaned on the inside face in overlapping passes and buffed dry, because a smear that is invisible at nine in the morning is a photograph at four in the afternoon. The outside face above the ground floor is the management company’s cradle contract and nobody from our team is climbing on your balcony to argue with that.

Balcony and terrace door tracks: brush lifted, channel flushed, runner dried. It is a twenty-minute job that fails more check-outs on this development than anything in the bathroom.

What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until the clerk is booked

Plain numbers, in a sentence. A studio at Dalston Square is £156, a one-bed is £207, a two-bed is £243, a three-bed is £339, and a four-bed or a larger duplex is £425. If the job is genuinely partial, because you have done the bedrooms yourself and want the kitchen and bathrooms handled properly, we work by the hour at £30 per cleaner instead. Those are full prices. No VAT bolted on afterwards, no call-out charge, no surcharge for a high floor, and no discount theatre either, because we would rather quote you once and correctly.

Every one of those jobs runs against the same 57-point agent-approved checklist and carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. The checklist is not decoration. It is the thing that makes our 97% first-time pass rate possible, and it is why the 300+ letting agents on our books will accept a Monster invoice as evidence of a clean without arguing about it.

Add-ons sit on top and only if you want them. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed’s carpeted area. Oven work is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range, though ranges are rare on this development and most Square kitchens take the single or double rate.

Now the maths nobody runs. A two-bed on the Square at the borough average is somewhere north of £2,600 a month, so a five-week deposit is over £3,000. The clean is £243. People spend a fortnight agonising over whether to spend the £243, having never once written down that the thing it protects is worth more than twelve times as much, and then they hand back a flat with a loaded extractor filter and lose £180 of the deposit to a contractor rate the agent picked, not one they did. We are not pretending every clean pays for itself. Plenty of tenants do a fine job unaided. But if you are going to gamble £3,000, at least look at the odds first.

“Eighteen months in a two-bed in Dunbar Tower, both of us working, and we genuinely thought a new-build would be the easy one. Then the clerk’s pre-walk warned us about the fridge seal and the extractor and I realised I had never once opened the cabinet the fridge lives behind. Monster came in on a Wednesday, two cleaners, just under seven hours, and they spent most of it on the kitchen and the glass. What sold me was the bloke telling me straight that the mark on the induction hob was a scratch and no amount of cleaning would shift it, so not to worry about it. Clerk passed us first time. Full deposit back nine days later.”
Naomi K., Dunbar Tower, Dalston Square E8 3DT, May 2026

End of tenancy, deep, regular, domestic: four words agents use loosely

These four get used as though they mean the same thing. They do not, and booking the wrong one is a cheap mistake with an expensive ending.

End of tenancy clean

The hand-back clean. Empty property, fixed price, worked against the 57-point agent-approved checklist and aimed squarely at an inventory clerk’s report rather than at your own eye. Inside the oven, behind the fridge, the seals, the tracks, the glass. This is the one you want when you are leaving Dalston Square.

Deep clean

The same intensity, but for a home you are staying in. Furniture is present and gets worked around. No inventory, no clerk, no pass or fail, and no re-clean guarantee, because there is nothing to be judged against.

Regular cleaning

A retainer. The same cleaner keeps your flat ticking over weekly or fortnightly, priced per cleaner per hour. It keeps a place nice. It will not, on its own, get a flat through a check-out after two years of cooking.

Domestic cleaning

The catch-all term for household work as opposed to commercial or office work. Agents say “domestic” when they mean regular, landlords sometimes say it when they mean end of tenancy, and that ambiguity is why we always ask what the clean is actually for before we quote.

If you are unsure which one you need, describe the situation on the phone and we will tell you, including the times the honest answer is that you do not need us at all. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected].

Questions we get asked

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost at Dalston Square?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed or duplex £425. Full fixed prices, no VAT on top, no call-out fee. If the job is partial we work by the hour at £30 per cleaner instead. Carpet shampoo and oven work are priced separately.

How long does the clean take?

A one-bed runs four to five hours with two cleaners. A two-bed with two bathrooms is six to seven. A three-bed takes eight to nine. Flats here are compact for their bedroom count, but the integrated appliances and the glass add time rather than save it. Do not assume a new-build is quicker than an old one. It is not.

Do you guarantee I get my deposit back?

No, and be careful with anyone who says they do. Deposit deductions cover things cleaning cannot touch: scuffed paint, a cracked hob, wear on the carpet, the landlord’s own furniture. What we stand behind is the cleaning line. If the clerk flags any cleaning item within two days of our visit, we come back and put it right at no charge under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Our 97% first-time pass rate is what that buys you.

Do I need to be there on the day?

No. Most Dalston Square jobs run without the tenant present. You tell us who holds the keys, whether that is you, the block manager or the letting agent, and we sort access from there. We sign in at the concierge desk, work the flat, sign out, and email you a completion report with photos if you want them for your deposit file.

Can you work around the concierge and the lift?

Yes, and please tell us at booking rather than on the morning. Buildings of this size normally have rules about which lift kit travels in, and some block managers want the goods lift reserved ahead. We will not pretend to know your block’s current rules better than your block manager does, so check with them and tell us. We set the start time around it.

Are you insured?

Yes. Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, trading since 2014, with £5m public liability cover. Certificate on request, and block managers here ask often enough that we keep it to hand.

What do you do about the integrated fridge and dishwasher?

We pull them forward where the furniture door allows and clean the parts you cannot see with the door shut. Fridge and freezer get defrosted, washed, and the seals scrubbed along every fold, because that is where the residue sits and that is the first place a torch goes. Dishwasher filter comes out, soaks, goes back. The plinth gap underneath gets done too.

The hob is induction and it looks scratched. Can you fix that?

Cleaning and scratching are different problems. Burnt sugar and pan haze come off an induction top with a proper scraper and a dwell, and it will look close to new. Scratches in the glass do not come out, by us or anyone. If yours are scratches, that is a wear conversation with your landlord, and we will tell you so rather than take your money.

What about the floor-to-ceiling glass and the balcony doors?

The inside face is part of a standard clean here, done in overlapping passes and buffed dry so it does not haze when the afternoon sun hits it. Balcony door tracks get the brush lifted and the channel flushed. The outside face above ground level we do not do. That is the management company’s cradle contract.

Does Hackney’s selective licensing change what I have to clean?

Not by a single line. Hackney’s selective licensing scheme started on 1 May 2026 and runs to 30 April 2031, and Dalston ward covers the Square. What it changes is the paperwork around your tenancy, and that reaches you second-hand: a licensed let carries a documented trail, and documented lets get walked a little more carefully. The clean is the same. The scrutiny is higher.

Is the water really that hard, and does it matter for a two-year-old flat?

It matters more in a new flat, not less. Thames Water draws this part of London off chalk and treats its whole supply region as hard. The Square is bright chrome throughout, and a fortnight of skipped drying leaves a chalky bloom on the screen runner, kettle element and mixer base. We soak, dwell and polish dry rather than scour, because scoured chrome is a deduction of its own.

What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?

If your letting agent or the inventory clerk flags a cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we send a team back and fix it free. That is the whole promise. We use it on a small fraction of jobs, and across our books it is part of how we have helped recover £1.2m deposits for tenants.

How quickly can you book me in?

Two to three days’ notice is normal for E8 3. Same-day sometimes works if a team is already finishing on the Square or off Kingsland Road, so it is worth a phone call. Ring the office and we will tell you honestly what is free.