The wall they built to keep Downham out
In 1926 someone built a seven-foot brick wall across Valeswood Road, capped it with broken glass, and left it standing for twenty-four years. It sat at the junction with Alexandra Crescent, and the people who paid for it lived on the private Bromley side. They did not want council tenants from the new Downham Estate cutting through their road to reach the town centre. Bromley Council finally pulled it down in 1950, mostly so the fire engines could get through. That wall tells you almost everything you need to know about cleaning a property here, and I will get to why in a minute.
We clean rented homes on the Downham Estate for a living, both sides of the line, and the estate is a particular kind of job. It is one of the big interwar London County Council cottage estates, built between 1924 and 1930 to plans by the LCC architect George Topham Forrest. Around 7,000 homes went up for roughly 30,000 people, which made it the third largest of the eight cottage estates the LCC threw up on the edge of London in that decade. Most of those houses are still standing. A good number are now privately let, which is where we come in.
The estate was named after Lord Downham, who chaired the London County Council in 1919 and 1920, in the years when “homes fit for heroes” was the slogan and the LCC was buying up market gardens and farmland on the southern edge of the county to build them. Downham was countryside before 1924. By 1930 it was a whole town of brick cottages with its own shops, schools and churches, dropped onto fields between Catford and Bromley. That speed of building is why the houses are so consistent, and why a clean of one of them tends to repeat: once you have done a few Topham Forrest cottages you know where the dust sits and where the limescale hides.
This page is about getting your deposit back when you move out of one of them.
And the wall matters because it set the tone. The Downham Estate has spent a century being looked down on from the private side of the boundary, fairly or not, and the people who live in these houses now, owners and renters both, tend to keep them well precisely because of it. That cuts both ways at check-out. A landlord who has kept a Downham cottage in good order expects it back the same way, and the inventory will say so.
One estate, two town halls
Here is the awkward thing about Downham. The estate sits across a borough boundary. Of its 522 acres, 461 fell inside the old Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham and 61 inside the Municipal Borough of Bromley, and that split survives today in the two modern councils. So one row of near-identical Topham Forrest cottages can have Lewisham wheelie bins at one end and Bromley ones at the other. The postcode for this page is BR1 4PP, which is the Bromley side, and the page is parented to our Bromley end of tenancy hub. But plenty of the estate addresses we clean carry SE6 and sit under Lewisham.
Why does a cleaner care which council a flat answers to? Because the two boroughs run completely different landlord licensing regimes, and that changes what an inventory clerk turns up expecting. I will come back to the licensing in detail further down. For now, the short version is that the boundary the Downham Wall once marked in brick is still a real administrative line, and your address decides which side of it you are on.
The estate’s own geography is easy to read once you know it. Downham Way is the spine, running roughly north to south through the middle. The shopping parade and the older civic buildings cluster near it, and the Downham Health and Leisure Centre on Moorside Road, opened in 2007, is the modern landmark most people give as a meeting point. Valeswood Road, where the wall stood, is still there. If you have ever driven a vanload of kit around the loops and crescents off Downham Way, you will know the layout was designed for prams and not for parking two cars per house, which is the daily reality now.
The split shows up in dull, practical ways on a move-out day. Bin collection days differ between the two councils, so the rubbish you leave out on the wrong day sits there for a week and the inventory clerk photographs it. Bulky-waste rules differ too, which matters when a tenant leaves a knackered sofa or a broken wardrobe in the garden and assumes the council will just take it. They will not, not for free, and a left-behind item is a deduction. We tell our Downham clients which council to ring for a bulky collection based on their postcode, because getting that one thing wrong can cost more than the clean.
It even reaches the small stuff. A Lewisham-side tenant and a Bromley-side tenant on the same crescent will have different recycling boxes, different food-waste caddies and, occasionally, a different answer on whether a particular street is in a controlled parking zone. None of that is exotic. It is just the kind of local detail a cleaning firm that actually works the estate knows, and an out-of-area outfit booked off a comparison site does not.
One row of near-identical Topham Forrest cottages can have Lewisham wheelie bins at one end and Bromley ones at the other.
What a Topham Forrest cottage cleans like
The houses are the reason the work is what it is. Topham Forrest built mostly two and three-bedroom terraced and semi-detached cottages, brick, with small front gardens and longer back ones, plus 408 flats in low blocks of up to four storeys. They were sold off in large numbers under Right to Buy from the 1980s on, so the tenure now is a patchwork: owner-occupiers who bought, alongside a steady layer of private lets where a former council house has changed hands and ended up rented out. Those private lets are most of our move-out work here.
What does that mean with a mop in your hand? A few things, all specific to this stock.
The original houses are nearly a century old. Many still have the small original kitchens and bathrooms, or a 1990s replacement that is itself now tired, and the surfaces are the kind that hold grease and limescale rather than wipe clean. South-east London is a hard water area, so the limescale on taps, shower screens and the inside of kettles is heavier than a clerk from a softer part of the country expects. Skirting, picture rails and the tops of doors in these cottages collect a surprising amount of dust because the rooms are smaller and the airflow is poor.
Then there are the gardens. A Downham cottage usually has a back garden, and a back garden means trodden-in mud by the back door, a utility area or lean-to that the tenant treated as outdoors, and sometimes a shed the inventory still lists. None of that is hard to clean. It is just easy to forget, and forgotten jobs are where deductions come from.
The 408 flats are a different job again. They sit in low blocks of up to four storeys, and they tend to be smaller, simpler cleans than the houses, with shared stairwells we are not responsible for and compact kitchens that are quick to do well. A one-bed flat in one of these blocks is the cheapest end of tenancy clean we quote on the estate. The catch is access: a flat on the top floor of a block with no lift means carrying machines up, so we like to know the floor when we price it.
Loft conversions and rear extensions are common too, because a growing family in a two-bed cottage builds up rather than moves. An extra room often means an extra bathroom, extra windows, and a flight of stairs with a runner that has never been lifted. We price and clean for the house as it actually is on the day, not the two-bed it was in 1928.
One more thing about the stock, because it catches people out. These were working-class family houses, built to be lived in hard, and after ninety years of that the wear is real. Original timber sash or steel-framed windows that stick. Painted-over surfaces with decades of layers. Cupboards that do not quite shut. We clean what is there to a proper standard, but a clean does not undo age, and a sensible inventory clerk does not expect it to. The clerk is looking for dirt and damage, not for the house to be new. Knowing that line, what is fair wear and tear versus what is a cleaning fault, is half of getting a deposit back, and it is the half tenants worry about most.
The licence question depends which side of the line you are
This is the part where the borough boundary stops being trivia and starts costing money. The two councils that share the Downham Estate license private landlords in opposite ways, and you need to know which one your address falls under before you assume anything about your tenancy.
On the Lewisham side, almost every private let now needs a licence. Lewisham brought in a borough-wide selective licensing scheme on 1 July 2024, covering around 20,000 privately rented homes, and Downham is named in it. The council split the borough into three designations, and Downham sits in designation three alongside Bellingham, Forest Hill, Grove Park and Whitefoot. The scheme runs to 30 June 2029. A licensed landlord has signed up to property standards, which in practice means the better landlords keep the place in inventory-ready order between tenancies and expect the same back from you.
On the Bromley side, there is no selective licensing at all. Bromley runs only the mandatory HMO licence that every council in England must operate, for larger shared houses, and it has no additional or selective scheme on top. So a BR1 cottage let to one family is not licensed by anybody, and the standard your deposit is judged against comes purely from your tenancy agreement and the check-in inventory rather than from any council rule.
One thing now applies to both sides equally, whatever the council does. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 has changed the wider rules for private tenancies in England, scrapping fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies and the old no-fault eviction route. It does not change the basic deposit deal one bit. Your deposit still has to sit in a protected scheme, and the landlord can still propose a cleaning deduction at the end if the place comes back below the check-in standard. So the law has moved, but the reason we exist has not: a clean house at check-out is still the thing that gets your money back.
I am not a solicitor and this is not legal advice. Confirm your own position with whichever council your postcode sits under. But the practical upshot is simple, and it is the thing that makes Downham different from a single-borough area: two tenants on the same street, renting the same model of house, can be under two different licensing regimes. A few of the terms an inventory clerk will use, plainly:
- End of tenancy clean
- A full deep clean of an empty property, priced on its size rather than by the hour, taken back to the check-in standard so the deposit can be returned. Some agents call it a move-out clean or a check-out clean. It is the service this page is about.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photographs taken the day you moved in, recording the condition of every room. At the end your empty home gets compared against that document, so it, and not your own memory, is what the clean is judged against.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme that makes most private landlords hold a licence to let, tied to property standards. Live across the Lewisham side of Downham since 1 July 2024; absent on the Bromley side.
- Deposit protection
- Your deposit must by law sit in a government-approved tenancy deposit scheme. If the landlord wants a cleaning deduction and you dispute it, that scheme adjudicates, and a professional clean receipt is good evidence.
- Fair wear and tear
- Normal ageing a landlord cannot charge you for. Per Citizens Advice, a landlord cannot take money from your deposit for reasonable wear and tear, only for damage or for leaving the place dirtier than you found it.
Inside the 57-point clean
The clean itself is the same high standard whichever side of the boundary you are on. Our supervisor turns up with a 57-point agent-approved checklist and works through it room by room, and you are welcome to read it before we start so there are no surprises at the end. It is built around what inventory clerks in this part of south-east London actually photograph, which is not always what tenants assume.
Top to bottom, every room. Skirting, switches, sockets, door frames and the tops of doors wiped. Walls spot-cleaned for marks. Inside and outside of every cupboard and wardrobe. Kitchen units cleaned inside and out, worktops degreased, splashbacks descaled. The oven stripped down, racks and trays soaked, the glass done both sides, the hob and extractor degreased. Fridge and freezer cleaned out, which is why we ask you to defrost it the night before. Bathrooms descaled and sanitised throughout, with the limescale on screens and taps actually shifted rather than smeared. Floors vacuumed and washed, carpets vacuumed. Windows cleaned inside as standard.
We bring our own machines and materials, so you do not need to leave anything behind. Two things have to be true when we arrive, though: the property needs electricity and running hot water on, and it needs to be empty of your belongings, because we cannot clean a cupboard with your saucepans still in it. On the older Downham cottages with a back boiler or an ageing immersion, please check the hot water actually runs hot before the day, because no hot water slows the whole job down.
It helps to know how a check-out is actually judged, because tenants picture it wrong. An independent inventory clerk walks the empty house with the check-in report and a camera, room by room, and marks each item against how it was the day you moved in. They are not grading on whether the place looks tidy. They are grading on whether it matches the document, which is why a house that feels clean to you can still pick up notes if the oven glass, the limescale or the inside of the units were skipped. We clean to that document, not to a vague idea of tidy, which is the whole point of working off a checklist rather than eyeballing it.
That checklist is the reason we hit a 97% first-time pass rate. The other 3% are usually a clerk flagging something genuinely outside a standard clean, like a stain that needs the carpet machine, and that is what the guarantee further down covers.
Where Downham deposits actually go
After enough move-outs on one estate you learn where the money leaks. On Downham it is a short, predictable list, and almost all of it comes back to the age of the houses and the hardness of the water.
The oven first. The oven is the single most common cleaning deduction we see, anywhere, and a Downham kitchen with a freestanding cooker that has done ten years of family roasts is no exception. Clerks open the door, photograph the glass, pull out the bottom tray. Burnt-on grease is the easiest deduction in the book for them to justify, and the easiest for us to remove.
The oven is the single most common cleaning deduction we see, anywhere, and a Downham kitchen is no exception.
Limescale is second, and it is worse here than tenants expect because of the hard water. White furring on taps, a cloudy shower screen, scale around the base of a mixer and inside the kettle: all of it reads as “not cleaned” in a photo, even when you wiped it the morning you left, because wiping does not remove scale. It has to be dissolved. We carry the right descaler for it.
Then the cottage-specific ones. Mud and grass tramped in from the back garden, especially by the back door and on the bottom flight of any stair runner. The lean-to or utility space that got treated as a shed. Loft-room and extension windows that never got opened, let alone cleaned. Net curtains and blinds left grimy. The inside of fitted wardrobes in the bedrooms, which clerks always open and tenants rarely touch. None of these are difficult. They are simply the jobs people run out of time for on the last day, with the van booked and the keys due back.
Bathrooms deserve their own warning here. The combination of a small original bathroom, hard water and an extractor fan that has not worked in years means mould in the grout and a chalky film on every tile, and both photograph badly. A tenant who scrubbed the bath but left the grout grey and the sealant mouldy will still see a deduction, because the clerk reads the whole room, not the bit you cleaned. We do the grout, the sealant line, the screen and the showerhead, which is where the scale builds up worst, and we get the extractor grille while we are at it.
Kitchens are the other big one beyond the oven. The gap down the side of a freestanding cooker, the top of the extractor hood, the seal around the sink, the inside of the cutlery drawer with its years of crumbs: small areas, all of them on the clerk’s list. On a Downham cottage with an older fitted kitchen the cupboard doors are often the original timber, and they need wiping with something that lifts grease without stripping the paint. That is the kind of judgement that comes from doing the same houses over and over, not from a generic spray-and-go.
That last-day crunch is the real reason deposits get docked. Not laziness, time. You are carrying boxes, the removal firm is double-parked on a road that was never built for it, and the deep clean is the thing that gets rushed. Handing it to us is how you stop that from costing you.
What it costs and the 48-hour promise
We price end of tenancy cleans by the size and condition of the property, not by the hour. That matters, because an hourly price rewards a slow team and punishes you if the place needs more work than expected. A fixed price for the job means our cleaners stay until the checklist is finished, however long a particular Downham cottage takes, and you know the number before we start.
A one-bed flat in one of the estate blocks costs less than a three-bed cottage with a loft conversion and two bathrooms, which is as it should be. To give you an exact figure we need the bedroom and bathroom count and a rough idea of condition. Carpet cleaning, upholstery and exterior windows are priced as add-ons, because not every move-out needs them and I would rather you only paid for what your inventory actually requires.
People ask why they cannot just do it themselves and save the money. You can, and if you have the time and the right kit, sometimes you should. The problem is that the two things most likely to cost a deposit, oven grease and hard-water limescale, are exactly the two a domestic clean rarely shifts properly. A home oven cleaner and an hour with a sponge does not get burnt-on carbon off oven glass, and a general spray does not dissolve the scale welded to a Downham tap. We carry trade descaler and oven products and the machines to use them. The maths usually works out: the clean costs less than the deduction it prevents, which is the only reason letting agents recommend us in the first place rather than telling tenants to manage on their own.
The promise behind it is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the inventory clerk or your letting agent challenges our work within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no cost. That is not a goodwill gesture you have to argue for. It is the standard we sell, and it is why agents keep using us. 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. On a borough boundary where two clerks from two different agents might judge two identical houses, having a cleaner the agents already trust is worth more than it sounds.
If you want the wider service before you book, the end of tenancy cleaning hub explains how the whole thing works across London, and the deep cleaning page covers the option for a place you are staying in rather than leaving.
Booking a move-out clean on the estate
Booking is meant to be the easy part. Call us on 0333 555 2076, tell us the address and the bedroom and bathroom count, and say which side of the boundary you are on if you know, because the Lewisham and Bromley sides sometimes have different bin and access quirks. You can also use the contact form if you would rather write it down. We work seven days a week, including weekends and bank holidays, which suits a Friday or Saturday move when most tenancies actually end.
Tell us the day you need it. The best slot is after the van has gone and before the check-out, so we clean an empty house and nothing gets moved back in over our work. Parking on the estate is the usual headache, the loops off Downham Way were not built for vans, so let us know if there is a permit bay or a sensible spot and we will plan around it.
Add-ons are booked at the same time. Most Downham move-outs that need extras need one of these, and you book whichever your inventory calls for:
- Carpet cleaning by hot water extraction, for worn or stained carpets in the bedrooms and on the stairs, which on these cottages is where the wear shows.
- Oven cleaning as a deep strip-down, the single deduction most worth heading off before a clerk opens the door.
- Upholstery cleaning if a sofa or chairs are part of a furnished let and the inventory lists them.
- Window cleaning with water-fed poles where the exterior glass, including loft and extension windows, has to be done for the check-out.
- A removals job if you still need the place emptied first, since we cannot deep clean around furniture.
- Regular domestic cleaning at the other end, once you are settled in the new place.
If you are moving within the area rather than out of it, we cover the neighbours too. The Bellingham estate next door is the other half of the same LCC build, and we clean across Grove Park and Whitefoot, the other two Lewisham designation-three areas that border Downham. North of here we work Catford and Southend in SE6 and Lower Sydenham. On the Bromley side we cover Bromley Common and Beckenham down towards BR3.
Questions from Downham tenants and landlords
How much does end of tenancy cleaning in Downham cost?
It depends on the size and condition of the property, because we charge a fixed price for the job rather than by the hour. A one-bed flat in one of the estate blocks costs less than a three-bed cottage with a loft conversion. Tell us the bedroom and bathroom count and rough condition on 0333 555 2076 and we will give you an exact figure before you book.
Do I need a licensed landlord to get my deposit back in Downham?
No, the two are separate. Whether your landlord needs a licence depends on your side of the boundary: the Lewisham side falls under borough-wide selective licensing from 1 July 2024, while the Bromley side has mandatory HMO licensing only. Your deposit is judged against the check-in inventory either way, so a thorough clean is what gets it back.
Is my Downham address in Lewisham or Bromley?
The Downham Estate straddles both, with most of it historically in Lewisham and a strip in Bromley. A BR postcode usually means the Bromley side and an SE6 postcode the Lewisham side, but check with the council your postcode sits under, because it changes the licensing rules that apply to your let.
What does your end of tenancy clean include?
A full top-to-bottom deep clean of the empty property against a 57-point checklist: kitchen units and worktops, the oven stripped down, bathrooms descaled and sanitised, all floors, inside windows, inside cupboards and wardrobes, skirting and doors. We bring our own machines and materials. Carpets, upholstery and exterior windows are add-ons you book if the inventory needs them.
Do I have to be there during the clean?
No. Most people drop the keys or leave a lockbox code, since the property has to be empty and have electricity and hot water on anyway. We just need access and a way to lock up afterwards. Plenty of our Downham clients are already in the new place by the time we clean the old one.
What if the agent says the clean is not good enough?
That is what the 48-hour re-clean guarantee is for. If the inventory clerk or letting agent challenges our work within 48 hours, we come back and put it right at no cost. It is the main reason we are on the books of 300+ letting agents and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits.
Do you work weekends in Downham?
Yes, seven days a week including bank holidays. Most tenancies end on a Friday or over a weekend, so weekend slots are the ones we book most. Give us as much notice as you can, because the end of the month fills up fast.
Should I book carpet cleaning as well?
Only if your carpets need it, which on these older cottages they often do on the stairs and in the bedrooms. If the check-in inventory recorded clean carpets and they are now stained or flattened, our hot water extraction carpet cleaning is the surest way to avoid a deduction. If they are genuinely fine, skip it.