The inventory clerk on a Deptford High Street flat goes to the kitchen extractor before anything else, because a flat over a shop on a market street soaks up frying grease and street grime the way nowhere quieter does, and that steel filter is the first line the check-out report marks down. That, and the scale set hard on the shower head, is where SE8 deposits quietly leak away. I run Monster Cleaning Ltd, a UK end of tenancy firm on the Deptford patch since 2014, and we clean flats here from a fixed £156, or £30 per cleaner per hour for a part-job, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a fixed price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover SE8 across Deptford High Street, Deptford Market Yard and the arches, Albury Street, Watson’s Street, Octavius Street and the Crossfields Estate, the Pepys Estate down towards the river, and the new blocks at Deptford Landings. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lewisham.
How the check-in report quietly decides a Deptford deposit
Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does, and it decides everything that follows. On the day you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a report on every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the word “clean” or “as new” against the kitchen and the bathroom. Those words were true, because the flat had just had a professional clean. At the end of the tenancy a different clerk walks it again and compares the two, line by line, and anything worse than the move-in entry, beyond honest wear and tear, comes off your deposit. You are marked against a professional standard, which is why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely gets a Deptford flat over the line.
The money is not vague. On the DIY move-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a pattern I could recite in my sleep: sixty to a hundred and twenty pounds on the oven, eighty to a hundred and fifty on grout and scale, a chunk for the gaps behind the fridge and the washer, more again on the carpets. Set that against a deposit worth a month or two of rent on the High Street and the sum does itself.
Why is the clerk so hard on it here? The deposit is real money the agent has to account for to a scheme, so the inspection is genuinely adversarial, and the clerk is paid to find fault rather than wave you through. So you turn up with the flat cleaned to the report, ideally with your own photographs, rather than turning up hopeful.
One thing sits behind all of it in law. Your landlord cannot make a professional clean a condition of the tenancy, so nobody can force you to book us. The deposit is capped at five weeks of rent and protected in a scheme, and if it comes to a dispute the route runs through the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits or the Deposit Protection Service. A dated photo set and a clean invoice wins those.
What the licensing map says, street by street
Deptford is one of those places where the licensing rules change within a few hundred metres, and getting it right matters because a licensed let gets inspected harder at check-out. The High Street itself sits in Deptford ward, and Lewisham left Deptford ward out of the selective licensing scheme that began on 1 July 2024, so a straightforward private let on the frontage is not caught by that scheme.
Walk a little, though, and the ground shifts. Evelyn ward, which takes in the Pepys Estate and the streets down towards the river, sits in Designation 2 of the selective scheme and does need a licence. New Cross ward, south of the railway, is in Designation 1. And there is a second layer over the top of it all: Lewisham has run a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme since 5 April 2022, so a shared house anywhere in Deptford, High Street included, needs its own licence if three or more unrelated people share it. Five or more brings in mandatory HMO licensing. The selective licence is around £640 a property; the HMO fee is charged per household or bedroom.
What that means on the ground is simple. A licensed property carries a paper trail, and a clerk working a licensed let tends to go over the bath sealant, the oven glass and the appliance seals with more care, because the licence conditions put standards in writing. We clean every Deptford job to the same checklist regardless, but I always ask whether the flat is licensed, because it tells me how forensic the check-out is likely to be. If you are not sure which side of a ward line you sit on, give me the postcode.
Deptford is one of those places where the licensing rules change within a few hundred metres.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a Deptford move-out
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 took effect on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault eviction is gone. Every assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a rolling periodic tenancy, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point in the year instead of waiting for a fixed term to run down.
Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. You are still handed back the flat against the check-in report, and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing. Deptford was already a high-churn patch, full of students off the Goldsmiths side and young creatives around the arches. Let people leave on a rolling two months rather than a fixed date and the move-outs get more frequent and far less predictable.
The practical takeaway is dull and it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the end-of-month slot you want will already be gone if you leave it to the last week.
The 57 things we work through, room by room
Every Deptford booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks round here actually flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. This is the shape of it.
The kitchen, where most of the deposit goes
The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks go into a soak tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. That film is the single most-flagged oven fault in a check-out. The extractor hood comes next, and it earns its own line in Deptford: over a shop on a frying-heavy market street the baffle filter loads up faster than almost anywhere, so it is pulled, degreased and the canopy scrubbed. Then the rest. Hob rings and caps off and soaked, induction tops degreased on newer fits. Every cupboard inside, outside, on top and behind. Fridge and freezer defrosted and washed, door seals scrubbed. Washer drawer and gasket, dishwasher filter and arms. Sink, taps and drainer descaled, because the hard water never misses them. Tiles and grout scrubbed, floor pulled back where it lifts.
The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong
Scale comes off the taps, the shower head, the screen and the tile joints first, with the careful approach on any original chrome or brass. Then the rest in plain order.
- Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, the base, the cistern, the hinges, and behind the pedestal where only the clerk looks
- Shower screen both sides, the tracks and the sealant bead
- Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, the overflow and the plughole
- Mirror and cabinet, and behind them where they lift off the wall
- Extractor vent wiped and the sealant cleaned back to a usable state
- Floor into the corners, behind the loo, under the basin
Bedrooms, living rooms and the bits between
Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, door frames, doors, handles and the finger plates. Light fittings, shades, switches and the ceiling roses, which on a period Deptford conversion hold years of dust and always get checked. Window sills, reveals and the inside of the frames, with the timber sash windows on the older stock needing slow, patient work to the glass. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a fair line drawn, because a nail hole is a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub. Hard floors washed with the right product for the material, and an original tiled hall kept to neutral pH only.
Then everything else. The stair run from the street door up to a flat over a shop, tread by tread, which is the line that builds over a long tenancy. Cobwebs out of the ceiling corners. Sockets, switches, the thermostat and the entryphone. A final walk with a torch to catch the dust shadows the daylight hides. Two jobs sit outside the base clean as add-ons: professional carpet shampoo where the tenancy asks for it, and the exterior glass on an upper flat, quoted on the day.
What very hard water does to a Deptford bathroom
South London sits in a very hard water zone, and that one detail loses more deposits here than almost anything except the oven. Thames Water runs off the chalk at around 296 parts per million of calcium carbonate, and at that level scale builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than most tenants expect (Thames Water hard water guidance). A wipe with a cloth does nothing to set scale, and the clerk knows this. They run a thumbnail down the tap, look at the screen edge-on against the light, pull the shower head in close.
Scale that has set into chrome is not a quick job. We soak it in a dilute acid with proper dwell time, then buff it dry. On the older Deptford stock, and the listed cottages in particular, the fittings are often original brass, and there acid is the wrong tool, so we switch to brass polish to protect the finish. Grout is the other one. Where it is genuinely past saving after a long tenancy, we photograph the state before we touch it, so the clerk cannot bill wear that was there at check-in.
A wipe with a cloth does nothing to set scale, and the clerk knows this.
Deptford top to bottom: the stock changes street by street
Deptford High Street runs half a mile north from the New Cross Road end towards Creek Road and the river, and the housing changes completely as you walk it. One method does not pass all of it. A restored railway arch at Deptford Market Yard and a listed Georgian cottage on Albury Street share a postcode and little else, so we work the patch in bands.
The listed Georgian and the Victorian terraces
The jewel is Albury Street, laid out from 1706 by the local builder Thomas Lucas for Dockyard officers and sea captains, and originally called Union Street. Ten of the houses are Grade II* listed and two more Grade II, with the carved timber doorcases and even the road setts protected inside St Paul’s Conservation Area. Inside a house like that, nothing aggressive goes near original plaster, tile or brass, and the clean is slow and hand-done. Around it sit the Victorian and Edwardian terraces and the shop-with-flat-above stock along the High Street, a lot of it split into conversion flats, where the deep skirtings and the sash tops are where the torch goes.
The estates: Crossfields and Pepys
Behind the railway viaduct, off Octavius Street and Watson’s Street, the Crossfields Estate is a run of mid-century Lewisham blocks and maisonettes, and further down towards the Thames, in Evelyn ward, the Pepys Estate steps to the river. These are usually clean, sensible two and three-bed layouts, and because much of this ground is inside the selective licence, the check-outs lean on the bath sealant, the oven glass and the appliance seals.
The conversions and the new-build
Then the newer Deptford. The restored arches at Deptford Market Yard and the warehouse conversions near the station bring exposed brick, engineered floors and big industrial windows, all of which want the right product rather than a scrub. The new blocks at Deptford Landings towards the creek come with build-to-rent inventory checklists stricter than most private landlords bother with; send us the operator’s spec sheet and we clean to it line by line. If your next flat is one stop over, we also cover New Cross, Deptford Bridge, Greenwich and Surrey Quays across the water.
What it costs, and the maths nobody runs in time
Deptford runs at our standard London pricing. It is not a premium patch, so the figures below are the flat rates, with kit, products and travel inside SE8 included, no VAT line and no fuel surcharge. A fixed quote, with the 57-point checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (over a High Street shop, or a Deptford Landings studio) | 3-4 hours, 1-2 cleaners | From £156 |
| 1-bed flat or conversion | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed flat, conversion or Crossfields maisonette | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed house, maisonette or Pepys Estate flat | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed house (Mary Ann Gardens, Albury Street) or large conversion | Full day, 2-3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Part-clean or partial scope | By the hour | £30 per cleaner |
| Carpet shampoo add-on | Same visit | £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room |
| Oven deep-clean add-on | Same visit | £77 single, £110 double, £114 range |
Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or an extractor untouched in years costs more, and I say so on the phone rather than after. Run the maths the way the deposit makes you: a one-bed at £207 to protect a couple of grand is not really a decision.
People muddle a few different jobs, and it is worth booking the right one.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document the clerk writes on day one, describing every surface 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 £30 per hour per cleaner or the fixed prices above.
- Deep clean
- A reset for a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit. Also from £30 an hour.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing upkeep on a weekly or fortnightly visit, from £22 an hour, a different service to the move-out clean.
A Crossfields job from February
“Three of us shared a two-bed maisonette on the Crossfields Estate for nearly three years, all working shifts, and honestly the oven and the extractor were beyond us by the end. The check-in report had the hood filter down as clean, so I knew that was coming back on us. Monster sent two cleaners for the best part of a day, stripped the oven, pulled the filter and did the bath sealant that had gone black in the corner. Acorn passed it first time and the full deposit came back the next week. I had braced myself to lose a few hundred quid.”
Danny, Crossfields Estate SE8, February 2026
That is the pattern on the estates: a long shared tenancy, an extractor and an oven nobody had dealt with, a licensed let where the clerk checks properly, and a clean that cost a fraction of what was at stake. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and that work has helped tenants hold on to money that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
Booking it, and the month-end problem
Deptford clusters its check-outs hard on the last two or three days of the month, the slots go, and ringing on the 29th for the 31st often means bad luck. Book early for those windows. The steps are simple enough.
- Ring 0333 555 2076. A price takes about three minutes. Give me the postcode, the property size, the check-out date and any known problem area, and mention anything the move-in report marked “clean” or “as new”.
- We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow a week to ten days for an end-of-month slot, three to five days mid-month.
- The flat wants to be empty when we arrive, furniture out and rubbish cleared, so we can reach everything the clerk will.
- We finish with a photo set, every room, and a written report by email on company paper. That is your evidence if the check-out tries to deduct.
- Check-out happens. Anything cleaning-related flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.
One honest note on access. Market days on the High Street make parking and loading slower, and a flat over a shop often means a key safe or an agent drop rather than a simple front door. Tell me the arrangement when you book and it takes the friction out of the day.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost around Deptford High Street?
A studio above a High Street shop starts at £156, a one-bed at £207, a two-bed at £243, a three-bed at £339 and a four-bed at £425. Those are fixed quotes with the 57-point agent-approved checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee built in, no VAT line and no travel charge inside SE8. A part-clean rather than a full move-out is £30 per hour per cleaner. Carpet shampoo and oven deep-cleans are priced on top, and I will tell you the number on the phone.
How long will the clean take?
A one-bed flat above a shop is four to five hours with two cleaners. A two-bed conversion off Albury Street or a Crossfields maisonette runs six to seven. A four-bed house on Mary Ann Gardens or a large warehouse conversion near the arches can be a full day with three of us, more if the kitchen extractor has never been touched. The listed Georgian stock takes longer than its bedroom count suggests, because the hand-work on original timber and plaster cannot be rushed.
Do you guarantee I get my deposit back?
No honest firm can promise that, because the check-out report covers things we never touch: paintwork, the landlord’s own furniture, fair wear on a carpet. What I guarantee is the cleaning. If the clerk flags any cleaning item inside 48 hours of our visit, we come back and put it right at no charge under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Our first-time pass rate sits at 97% across the books, and that is the number that matters when your deposit is a month or two of Deptford rent.
Is Deptford High Street inside Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme?
The High Street itself sits in Deptford ward, which Lewisham left out of the selective licensing scheme that started on 1 July 2024. But the picture changes within a few hundred metres. Evelyn ward, taking in the Pepys Estate and the streets towards the river, is in Designation 2 and does need a selective licence, and New Cross ward south of the railway is in Designation 1. On top of that, Lewisham runs a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme that has applied everywhere since 5 April 2022, so a shared house on the High Street still needs a licence. The licence changes the paperwork, not the cleaning standard, but licensed lets tend to get inspected harder.
Are you insured, and do I need to be there?
Yes, we carry 5 million pounds of public liability cover, and the certificate goes to you or your agent on request. Monster Cleaning Ltd is Companies House 9919639, trading since 2014. You do not need to be in. Most Deptford clients leave a key in a safe on the door or drop one with the managing agent, and we send a written report by email when we lock up.
Do you bring your own products and kit?
We do. That means a dilute acid for the hard-water scale on chrome, brass polish for the original mixer taps on the older stock, soft brushes and a barely-damp microfibre for lath-and-plaster and timber, and neutral pH for an original tiled hall. You do not need to leave a thing behind, and we would rather you did not, because a supermarket spray on a period surface can do more harm than the grime.
Can you clean a listed Georgian house on Albury Street without damaging it?
Yes, and we work sympathetically because the listing on that terrace is serious: ten houses at Grade II* and two more at Grade II, with the carved doorcases and the road setts inside St Paul’s Conservation Area. Listing controls repair, not cleaning, but old surfaces punish the wrong product. We keep steam and alkaline cleaners off original tile grout, hand-work the plaster rather than wet it, and polish the brass instead of hitting it with a chrome spray. The checklist still runs in full.
What does the market do to a flat above the High Street?
Deptford market trades on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, and a flat over a shop takes the consequences. Fine particulate from the street and the frying downstairs settles on the sash tops, the picture rail and the cornice line, and that is the film that shows up under a clerk’s torch after a long tenancy. We work those upper lines by hand from a stepladder, and we do the stair run from the street door up to the flat as well.
Do you cover the Pepys Estate and the Crossfields maisonettes?
Yes, both. The Pepys Estate runs down towards the river in Evelyn ward, inside the selective licensing designation, and Crossfields sits behind the railway viaduct off Octavius Street. The maisonettes are usually straightforward two and three-bed layouts, and the licence inspection leans on the bath-sealant grout, the oven door glass and the fridge seals, all of which are on the 57-point checklist as standard.
What about the hard water on the taps and shower?
South London runs on very hard water, around 296 parts per million of calcium carbonate off the chalk, and it builds fast on shower heads, screens, tap bases and kettle elements. A cloth does nothing to set scale. We soak the chrome in a dilute acid with real dwell time and then buff it dry. On the older Deptford stock with original brass fittings we switch to brass polish, because acid pits the lacquer.
How much notice do you need, and which agents do you work with?
Usually 48 to 72 hours across SE8, and sometimes same-day if a team is already finishing nearby. The month-end is the crush, so book earlier for the last three days of any month. We take key drops through the Deptford and Greenwich agents most weeks, including Acorn, Foxtons and Felicity J Lord, and plenty of tenants in privately let flats deal with us direct.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, exactly?
If the inventory clerk or the agent marks down any cleaning item within 48 hours of our visit, we send a team back to redo that item free, as long as the flat is still empty and untouched. We have leaned on it for roughly 3 jobs in 100 since 2014. Across the whole of our work that adds up to £1.2m in deposits recovered for tenants, and we would rather come back once than have you lose a penny of it.
Get a price
Call 0333 555 2076 and I price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, property size, check-out date, any known problem area, that is the lot. Out of hours, email [email protected] and someone rings you back first thing. And if your Deptford check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.