Albury Street, a market that shuts the road, and a Deptford move-out
Albury Street, the SE8 3PT turning a minute off Deptford High Street, has a row of early-1700s houses with carved doorcases that were built for sea captains back when the dockyard ran the place. We are on those streets most weeks, because a fair slice of our work sits around the High Street and the Creek, cleaning flats that tenants are handing back. An end of tenancy clean is the deep clean a property gets when one tenancy ends, before the deposit is settled.
The first thing anyone cleaning in Deptford has to plan around is the market. Deptford High Street and Douglas Way run a street market on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, roughly nine to half five, and on those days the High Street is shut to traffic from six in the morning until seven at night. A removal van cannot sit outside a High Street flat on a market day. We know it, and we book around it.
We are Monster Cleaning. We have been doing move-out cleans across south-east London since 2011. In Deptford we clean ex-council flats on the Crossfields estate by the Creek, conversion flats in the old terraces off the High Street, and a growing number of new-build flats on the riverside where the royal dockyard used to be. The brief never changes. Get the place back to the condition logged in the check-in inventory, so the deposit comes back to you instead of getting chipped away on cleaning charges.
There is a lot of history packed into a small place here. The High Street market has run in some form for well over a century, Douglas Way is still known across London for its bric-a-brac and second-hand stalls, and the Albany on Douglas Way has been a community arts hub since it grew out of the old Deptford Fund in the 1890s. St Paul’s, the Thomas Archer Baroque church finished around 1730, sits a short walk south and is one of the finest of its kind in London. None of that cleans itself, but it tells you the area, and an area with this much turnover keeps tenancies moving.
This page runs long on purpose. Deptford has its own quirks, from the market closures to the licensing rules and the wave of new flats by the river, and each one changes how a move-out clean here actually works. Here is what the rest of it covers.
A handful of terms come up over and over once you start moving out, so here they are in plain words first.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full deep clean of an empty property, priced on its size rather than by the hour, done to the check-in standard so the deposit can be returned. Also called a move-out clean or a check-out clean.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photographs taken when you moved in, recording the condition of every room. At the end the clerk compares the flat to this document, so it is the thing your clean is measured against.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme that makes most private landlords hold a licence to let, with conditions attached to the property. Lewisham runs one across Deptford, set out on the Lewisham Council licensing pages.
- Deposit protection scheme
- A government-approved scheme that holds your deposit and runs free dispute resolution. The rules are on GOV.UK.
- Move-out clean versus deep clean
- A move-out clean is done to an empty property against the check-in report so the deposit comes back. A deep clean is a thorough clean of a place you still live in, with no inventory to answer to. Different jobs, different scope.
A market day closes the road, and what it does to moving day
Most of the country plans a move-out around the van. In Deptford you plan it around the market first, then the van. On a Wednesday, Friday or Saturday the High Street is pedestrianised from six in the morning, so a flat above a High Street shop simply cannot have a Luton parked outside until the stalls clear in the evening. If your keys are due back on a market day, we will tell you straight to start early off a side street, or to shift the clean to the Thursday.
Why does a cleaner care about a market timetable. Because the van and the clean have to land in the same window, and a closed road moves that window for everyone. We would rather book a Deptford job for a morning when a bay is findable than promise a midday slot on a Saturday when half the High Street is fish stalls and the other half is parked solid.
The trains here are a point of local pride, oddly enough. Deptford station opened in February 1836 on the London and Greenwich Railway, which makes it the oldest suburban station in the world still sitting on its first site, and it runs on the brick viaduct of 878 arches that was the longest run of arches in Britain. Off the platform you get Southeastern and Thameslink into London Bridge in a few minutes. A lot of our Deptford tenants never owned a car the whole tenancy, so the move-out is a train-and-van job, with the tenant gone on the Greenwich line while a small van does the lifting from the kerb.
The DLR fills the gap the railway leaves. Deptford Bridge station, a short walk south, runs straight to Canary Wharf, Bank and the City, which is half the reason young professionals keep moving into the new blocks by the river. New Cross and New Cross Gate, just to the south, add the Overground for anyone heading north of the Thames. For most of our jobs, though, the van still has to get to a side street off the High Street, and that is where Deptford starts to bite.
The streets off the High Street are tight. Victorian terraces with cars down both sides, controlled parking through much of the day, and a Creekside estate layout that was never drawn for a removal lorry. We carry the kit in from the road and work round it, because there is rarely off-street parking and the shared halls in the conversions are narrow. The parking is the worst part of working these roads, honestly, especially on a market day when the High Street itself is off the table.
Buses pick up the slack. The 47, 53, 188 and 199 thread through Deptford between the High Street, Surrey Quays and Lewisham, so a tenant without a car is rarely stuck, and we can crew a job here without everyone needing to drive, which keeps another van off an already full street.
In Deptford you plan it around the market first, then the van.
From Henry VIII’s dockyard to three thousand new flats
Deptford housing comes in two broad waves, and they could not be more different to clean when a tenancy ends. There is the old Deptford, the Georgian and Victorian terraces and the post-war council estates around the High Street and the Creek. And there is the new Deptford going up on the riverside, where Henry VIII founded a royal dockyard in 1513 and the navy built warships for three and a half centuries until it closed the yard in 1869.
That dockyard is the reason for the biggest change in the area. The site became Convoys Wharf, a paper depot, and it has now been cleared for one of the largest regeneration projects in south London, around 3,500 new homes on sixteen-odd acres by the Thames, built out over a decade or more. The Grade II listed Olympia Building, the old covered slip where ships were laid down, is being kept as the centrepiece. The first residential block of more than 450 flats was approved years back, and the new-builds are filling up with renters who commute from Deptford Bridge.
The new flats and the old terraces fail their check-outs in completely different ways. A two-year-old flat on the riverside has factory-finished surfaces, a fitted kitchen and an en-suite, so the clean is about leaving glossy units and shower screens spotless and getting the smell of a lived-in flat out of a small, sealed space. A Victorian conversion off the High Street has high ceilings with cornicing full of dust you cannot see from the floor, sash windows with deep painted reveals, and tired carpet or original boards a clerk will photograph in close detail.
It is a sharer area and an artist area and, increasingly, a young-family area, often on the same street. Plenty of these flats go to two or three people splitting the rent, the studios round Creekside have long drawn artists and makers, and the gentrification that came with the new-builds has brought in families who want a whole terrace near St Paul’s. When one old terraced house has been split into a ground-floor flat, a first-floor flat and a top conversion, each one has its own check-out and its own deposit riding on it.
Rents are not small, whichever wave you are in. The Office for National Statistics put the average private rent across Lewisham at £1,810 in March 2026, up 2.6% on the year from £1,764. On a two-bed Deptford flat the deposit behind that is real money, usually five weeks of rent, and a cleaning deduction comes straight off the top of it.
The council estates have a habit of their own. The Crossfields blocks and the older maisonettes by the Creek tend to have small kitchens with extractor fans that have run untouched for years, so the grease over the hob is heavier than tenants ever expect. We see that one a lot.
Two designations, one neighbourhood, and Deptford in Lewisham licensing
Lewisham Council brought in borough-wide selective licensing on 1 July 2024, and it runs for five years, to 30 June 2029. The scheme is split into three designated areas, and Deptford is unusual because it straddles two of them. The northern, riverside half, the Evelyn ward where Convoys Wharf sits, is in Designation 2 alongside Crofton Park, Ladywell, Lee Green and Sydenham. The southern end towards New Cross is in Designation 1. So a Deptford address can fall either side of the line, which trips people up when they assume the whole of SE8 is treated the same. Check the address, not the postcode.
In plain terms, most landlords letting a Deptford flat to a single household or to two unrelated sharers now need a licence to do it. Around 20,000 properties across the borough are caught by the scheme, which the council says it brought in only where it could show the need, so a couple of wards like Telegraph Hill sit outside it. Deptford does not.
HMOs are handled separately and more widely. Mandatory HMO licensing applies right across Lewisham, and the council added a borough-wide additional HMO scheme back in April 2022 for smaller shared houses, running its own five years. A shared house in Deptford can therefore be caught twice over. The detail and the property-level map are on the Lewisham Council selective licensing pages.
Why does a cleaning firm care about a licensing scheme. Because a licensed let is a managed let, and a managed let gets a proper check-out. A licensed landlord has written conditions to keep the property in order, an agent or inventory clerk doing the inspection, and a paper trail that a deposit scheme will read if there is a dispute. The casual wipe-it-and-hand-the-keys-over arrangement is fading out in Deptford, and the standard you are cleaning to has climbed with it.
The deposit itself is protected by law. Your landlord has to put it in one of the government-approved schemes within 30 days, and the rules are set out on GOV.UK. When the tenancy ends, Shelter puts it plainly: you should get your deposit back, and the landlord needs a reason to keep any of it. Cleaning is the reason landlords reach for most often.
The wider law is shifting too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, changes how tenancies start and end and abolishes the old fixed-term assured shorthold, which makes a clean, well-evidenced check-out matter more rather than less. If a deduction does land on you unfairly, Citizens Advice notes that a receipt for a professional clean is useful evidence when you take a cleaning charge to the free dispute service. You usually have three months from moving out to make that claim, so the condition you leave the flat in is half the argument.
What a Deptford check-out is judged on
It helps to know what happens on the day the keys go back, because the clean is built to answer it. An inventory clerk, or the agent, walks the empty flat with the check-in report in hand and goes room by room, comparing what they see now against what was photographed when you moved in. Anything dirtier or more damaged than that baseline gets noted, and each note is a possible charge against your deposit.
Cleaning and damage are scored separately, which matters. Fair wear and tear is not your liability, so a carpet that has thinned naturally over a couple of years is the landlord’s cost, not yours. A carpet with a red-wine stain ground into it is a different matter, and that is where a proper clean earns its keep, because hot-water extraction lifts marks a household vacuum never will, turning a stained-charge-the-tenant line into a clean-no-action one.
The clerk works to a checklist of their own. That is the whole reason we work to one the agents recognise. When the list we cleaned against and the list they are scoring against line up, there is simply less to argue about, and the inspection moves quicker for everyone standing in the flat that morning.
Timing runs tight here, and the market makes it tighter. Tenancies often end mid-week, the agent wants the keys promptly, and the inspection sometimes happens the same day you leave. We slot the clean into that gap, usually the morning you move out or the day after, working round the market days so the flat is inspection-ready the moment the clerk arrives instead of a last-minute scramble while the van waits on a single yellow line.
Get this wrong and it costs you twice. You lose the deposit money on the deductions, and you lose the time and the stress of a dispute weeks later, by which point you have moved on and the only evidence is whatever photos you happened to take. Booking a clean to the inventory standard up front is the cheaper road, nearly every time.
What our Deptford move-out clean covers
Our supervisor arrives with a 57-point agent-approved checklist and works through it room by room, and you can ask for a copy at the end so you can walk the flat against it before the agent does. The list is the same one the letting agents we work with recognise. That is the point of it. It maps onto what the check-out actually scores.
In the kitchen that means the oven stripped inside and out, the hob and extractor degreased, the fridge and freezer cleaned once they are defrosted, and the cupboards wiped inside and out. Bathrooms get the limescale taken off taps, screens and tiles, the grout scrubbed, and the toilet, basin and bath or shower sanitised. Through the rest of the flat we hoover carpets and upholstery, clean skirting and doors, wipe switches and sockets, clear the cobwebs, and do the windows on the inside.
Bedrooms and living rooms get the full treatment too. We hoover the carpets right into the edges and under where the bed and the sofa stood, wipe down every door and frame, clean the light switches and the sockets, run a cloth along the skirting and the tops of the radiators, take the cobwebs out of the corners, and clean the windows and sills inside. Mirrors and any fitted wardrobes get done inside and out.
The new-build flats by the river need a particular eye. A sealed modern flat holds cooking smells and shower damp, the shower screen scales up fast on the hard water, and the glossy kitchen units show every smear under the downlights, so we finish those surfaces properly rather than just wiping them over.
It is priced on the property, not the clock. A move-out clean is not an hourly service here, so the team stays until the checklist is done, even when a neglected oven in a Crossfields flat eats an extra hour nobody planned for. You pay for the job, not the overrun.
A few things sit outside the standard clean and get added when the flat needs them. Carpets that are stained rather than just dusty want a proper carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction. A badly burnt oven sometimes wants a dedicated oven clean. Sofas and mattresses can have an upholstery clean, and outside glass a window clean. We will tell you straight whether you need them or not.
The jobs that quietly cost SE8 tenants their deposit
Some charges come up again and again on Deptford check-outs. The oven is the classic. The oven is the single most common cleaning deduction we see, because a grill pan and a glass door that look passable to a tired tenant at eleven at night look filthy to a clerk with a clipboard and a torch the next morning, and the charge for a professional oven clean then comes off the deposit at a worse rate than booking it yourself would have cost.
Limescale is the next one. Then carpets.
The water round here is hard, so bathrooms in the older terraces and the new riverside flats alike build up scale on the taps and the shower screen, and a clerk will mark a chalky screen as not clean even when the rest of the bathroom is fine. Carpets in a sharer flat take a hammering over a year, and the line between fair wear and a stain you owe for is exactly the line a deposit dispute turns on.
The kitchen extractor is the one tenants forget completely. Behind the metal grille the filter clogs with grease, and in a small Crossfields kitchen with a fan that has run for years that grease is thick. Nobody touches it during the tenancy and nobody remembers it at the end, so it lands on the report.
Then there are the small ones that quietly add up. The white toilet seat gone yellow at the hinges. The window tracks full of grit off the High Street. The fridge seal with old spills set into it. None of these is a big charge on its own, but a clerk who lists six of them has built a deduction worth more than the clean would have cost, and that is exactly how a deposit gets whittled down a tenner at a time.
Sharer flats throw up one more issue. When three people move out on different days, the last one out often gets the blame for the state of the shared kitchen and bathroom everybody used. A single clean to the inventory standard, booked for the whole flat once everyone has gone, settles that fairly for all of you.
None of this is exotic. It is the same short list of jobs that lose deposits all over Deptford, and it is the list our checklist is built around, because we would sooner you spent a fixed fee with us than an open-ended deduction with the inventory clerk.
The oven is the single most common cleaning deduction we see.
What it costs, and how the guarantee works
The price depends on the property, not the hours, so a studio off the High Street costs less than a four-bed terrace near St Paul’s, and you know the figure before we start. Tell us the postcode and how many bedrooms and bathrooms, mention anything in a bad way, and we will quote it. No clock running in the background.
The guarantee is the part that counts at a check-out. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate on managed Deptford lets, which means the clean clears the inspection on the first visit nearly every time. When it does not, the 48-hour re-clean covers you. If the inventory clerk or the agent flags anything within that window, we come back and put it right at no extra cost, which is the cleaner end of the deal than arguing a deduction after the deposit is already docked.
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That is not a slogan. It is what a clean to the inventory standard, backed by the checklist the agents already recognise, adds up to across thousands of move-outs.
Booking through us tends to be smoother when your agent is one of those 300, because they know the 57-point checklist, they trust the result, and the check-out moves quicker for it.
People ask why we hold a fixed price when an hourly rate would let us charge more on the grim jobs. The honest answer is that hourly pricing makes tenants watch the clock and worry, and a worried customer who thinks they are being spun out does not book again or send a neighbour. A flat fee, quoted up front and held even when the oven is a state, is simply how we would want to be treated, so it is how we work.
Booking a move-out clean in Deptford
Booking is quick. Phone 0333 555 2076 or send the details through the contact page, and tell us the postcode, the bedroom and bathroom count, and the date the keys are due. We work seven days a week, weekends included, which matters when the tenancy ends on a Saturday and the agent wants the keys on Monday. Mention if it is a market day on the High Street and we will plan the access around it.
Two practical things on the day. The property needs electricity and running hot water on, and it needs to be empty of your belongings so the team can clean every surface. If there is a fridge or a freezer, defrost it the night before. Beyond that we bring the machines, the cloths and the detergents, and we get started.
If you are moving on rather than just out, we also run a removals service, and if it is a live-in deep clean you want instead of a move-out one, see deep cleaning or our regular domestic cleaning. The full end of tenancy service runs right across south-east London.
We cover the rest of Lewisham and the streets around the Creek too. There are matching move-out pages for New Cross, Brockley, Evelyn, Deptford Bridge, Greenwich across the Creek, Surrey Quays, Rotherhithe and Lewisham.
Questions from Deptford tenants and landlords
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Deptford?
The price is set on the property, not the hour, so a studio off Deptford High Street costs less than a four-bed terrace near St Paul’s. Tell us the postcode, the bedroom and bathroom count, and anything in a rough state, and we will give you a fixed quote before we start. Nothing on the clock, nothing tacked on at the end.
Will the clean pass the check-out?
Nearly always. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate on managed Deptford lets, so the clean clears the inspection on the first visit in almost every case. If the inventory clerk or agent flags anything inside the 48-hour re-clean window, we come back and put it right at no extra cost.
Does selective licensing in Deptford affect my move-out clean?
Indirectly, yes. Deptford falls inside Lewisham’s borough-wide selective licensing scheme, which started on 1 July 2024, so most lets here are managed and get a proper check-out against the check-in inventory. That lifts the cleaning standard you are judged against. The detail and the property map are on the Lewisham Council licensing pages.
What does the 57-point checklist cover?
It runs room by room, from the oven, hob and extractor in the kitchen to the limescale on bathroom taps, screens and tiles, then carpets, skirting, doors, switches, cobwebs and the inside of the windows. It is the same list the letting agents we work with recognise, and you can ask for a copy at the end to walk the flat against it.
Can my landlord take cleaning costs out of my deposit?
Only with a reason. Your deposit is held in a government-approved scheme, and the rules are on GOV.UK. If a cleaning charge looks unfair you can use the scheme’s free dispute service, and Citizens Advice notes that a receipt for a professional clean helps your case.
Do you clean carpets and ovens as part of the service?
A standard clean hoovers the carpets and wipes the oven. Heavy stains or a badly burnt oven want the deeper add-ons, so we can fold in carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction and a dedicated oven clean where the flat needs them. We tell you straight whether it does.
How quickly can you clean a Deptford flat?
Often within a day or two of you ringing, weekends included. Most one and two-bed flats are a single day on site, and we stay until the checklist is done, so a neglected kitchen near the end of the day never gets rushed to beat a clock.
What do you need from me before you arrive?
Electricity and running hot water on, the flat emptied of your belongings, and any fridge or freezer defrosted the night before. Beyond that we bring the machines, the cloths and the detergents, and we get started.
Is an end of tenancy clean the same as a deep clean?
No. An end of tenancy clean is done to an empty flat against the check-in inventory so your deposit comes back. A deep clean is for a home you still live in and has no inventory to answer to. Tell us the situation and we will point you to the right one.
Which parts of Deptford and Lewisham do you cover?
All of SE8 and the streets around it, from the High Street and Convoys Wharf out to New Cross, Brockley and Greenwich across the Creek. We have matching move-out pages for New Cross and Greenwich, and we cover the rest of south-east London too.