Dulwich Village end of tenancy cleaning, sorted

The clerk who checks a house on Dulwich Village street will stand at an upper window first, side-on to the light, looking for a haze on the old glass that a chemical cleaner leaves behind. Hand-blown panes are mineral, and the wrong spray clouds them for good. That is the kind of thing the village core gets marked on, so end of tenancy cleaning here has to be built for the person writing the report rather than for a quick once-over: checklist-led, deposit-focused, £30 per hour per cleaner on a part job, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the clerk’s own notes. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SE21 7 conservation core in full: Dulwich Village street, College Road, Gallery Road, Court Lane, Calton Avenue, Pickwick Road, Aysgarth Road and the Burbage Road end, plus the rest of SE21. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Southwark.

How the check-in report quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does, and it is the whole game. When you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photographs, often with the word “clean” or “as new” against the kitchen, the bathroom and the floors. Those words were true on the day, because the place had just been done professionally. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares the two line by line. Anything materially worse than the move-in entry, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean. A mop and a free Sunday rarely reach that bar.

In the village the deductions land on detail rather than dirt. A chemical smear in the corner of an old pane, caught in low afternoon light. Parquet edge-grout darkened where someone ran a wet mop over an oak floor that should never have been mopped. A soot ring on a marble fireplace from a winter of open fires. Picture rails and cornicing furred with dust nobody could reach without a step ladder. The interior of a built-in cupboard that pre-dates Queen Victoria. None of those is grime in the ordinary sense, and all of them read as a poor hand-back to a clerk who knows the stock.

Why so exact here? Because the deposit is large and the agent is on the hook for protecting it. A village house lets at a level where a five-week deposit is a serious sum, and the clerk is paid to find faults rather than wave you through. That is not unfair. It just means you turn up with evidence.

In the village the deductions land on detail rather than dirt.

Why the Dulwich Estate raises the bar above any council

Dulwich Village is not a normal Southwark postcode, and the reason sits in the freehold. The conservation core of SE21 7 lies inside the Dulwich Estate, and most property here is bound by its Scheme of Management, approved by the High Court in January 1974. The Scheme requires owners to keep the house and the gardens in good order and to get written sign-off before any work that changes the look of the property. The annual charge is small and set against council tax band, but the standard it imposes is not. The result on hand-back is a house the clerk treats like a small heritage asset, not a let.

That estate baseline is harder to argue with than a council notice. The clerk passes the property back to a managing agent, who answers to a freeholder, who answers to the Scheme. Anything you scratch, scuff or stain is measured against a maintained-heritage standard rather than a minimum one, which is why a College Road house and an equivalent flat a mile north are not the same job whatever the floor count says.

The clipboards come from real local desks, too. Harvey & Wheeler have been at 33 Dulwich Village for over 160 years, with Pedder, KFH, Knight Frank and Foxtons handling the larger College Road and Court Lane lets. None of them inventory by template. They walk a house for an hour or two and write up a schedule that knows the difference between a cracked Georgian hearth tile and a hairline in early-nineteenth-century plaster.

The clerk passes the property back to a managing agent, who answers to a freeholder, who answers to the Scheme.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a village move-out

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault eviction is gone, every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, and a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point in the year.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The check-in benchmark still applies. The deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. A landlord still cannot make professional cleaning a condition of the contract, but the standard the clerk measures you against is unchanged. What shifted is timing.

Village tenancies have always run long, family lets of three, five, ten years in the same house, which means the build-up the clean has to undo is deeper than in a high-churn block. Move people onto a rolling two months’ notice rather than a fixed end date and those long lets end less predictably, and they cluster harder around the school terms and the end of the month. The takeaway is dull and it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you would have, because the slot you want goes first.

The 57 points, and where the hours actually go

Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of London check-outs and tuned to what these clerks flag in period stock. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it, room by room.

The kitchen, where most deposits go

The oven is stripped, not wiped: racks soaked in a tank, the door glass split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out, interior and fan and seals all done. The hob and burners come off, the extractor canopy is degreased inside and the filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard inside, outside, top and underneath, including the deep awkward corners in the older village kitchens. Fridge and freezer defrosted and washed. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind the cooker, the fridge and the washing machine get cleaned, then put back, and the washing machine drawer and door seal scrubbed. Sink, taps and waste descaled with proper dwell time, because this water sets scale fast. Tiles and grout brushed. Floor mopped last, once the dust has settled.

The bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first, with the careful approach on the original chrome and brass you find in the village bathrooms. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: bowl, under the rim, base, cistern, hinge bolts and behind the pan where the clerk looks and nobody else does
• Shower screen both sides, the runner track and the sealant bead included
• Bath, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole; roll-top baths get their feet and underside done too, which is easy to skip
• Mirror, cabinet and the wall behind where it comes away
• Extractor grille wiped and the vent cleared
• Floor into the corners and behind the basin pedestal

Bedrooms, reception rooms and everything between

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard, and the storage in a village house can be enormous, so it always gets opened. Skirtings, architraves, doors, handles and finger plates. Light fittings, switch plates and the ceiling roses, which in a period house hold years of dust. Window sills, reveals and the inside glass, with the older boxes worked slowly by hand. Radiators behind, under and on top; the cast-iron ones take longer than a modern panel. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a fair line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Parquet swept and microfibre-mopped where present, the edge-grout hand-cleaned, carpets vacuumed top to tail. Then the throughway: cornicing and picture rails cleared on a step ladder, the staircase treads, risers and balusters, the entrance hall, and a final walk-through with a torch in low light to catch what daylight hides.

The oven is stripped, not wiped: racks soaked in a tank, the door glass split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out.

A few jobs need their own pass. The bedrooms often want the carpet cleaning add-on; a marble fireplace and parquet halls take the right products, which is what floor cleaning covers; and the double ovens and range cookers common in the village kitchens are heavy enough that standalone oven cleaning makes sense if that is all the agent flagged.

What Thames Water does to a village bathroom

South London sits in a very hard water zone, and that one fact loses more deposits here than almost anything except the oven. Thames Water runs at around 300 parts per million of calcium carbonate, because the supply comes up through chalk, and calcium builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect. A wipe with a cloth does nothing to set scale. The clerk runs a thumbnail down the tap and looks at the screen edge-on against the light. We acid-soak the chrome with real dwell time and polish it back.

The catch in the village is what you cannot use the descaler on. The older bathrooms keep original chrome or brass, and the houses are full of marble, limestone and old glass, none of which tolerates acid. So we bring two methods to one job: a measured descaler for the modern ceramic and chrome, and clean water and a stone-safe cleaner for everything the Scheme would call original. Grout is the other one, and where it is genuinely past saving in a long let we photograph it before we start. That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.

The village street by street, from the Gallery to the tollgate

The SE21 7 core is small, but the stock changes house by house and the clerk is told to look for different things on each. Sir John Soane’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, which opened in 1817 as the first purpose-built public art gallery in England, sits at the heart of it, with Dulwich College and the seventeenth-century Old College a short walk south. We work the whole conservation area in and around them.

Dulwich Village street and the Gallery side

The high-street parade and the listed Georgian houses either side of the old milestone are the postcard view, and the homes here are graded and watched. Original window glass, lath-and-plaster walls, decorative cornicing and ironwork all get named individually on an inventory, which means the clean has to match them individually. Gallery Road runs down the west edge past Christ’s Chapel, where Edward Alleyn, who founded the College in 1619, is buried, and the houses along it carry the same period detail.

College Road, the Old College and the tollgate

College Road is the spine, running south from the Old College and the Gallery toward the College Road tollgate, the last working toll gate in London, which has charged a toll on its private stretch since 1789 and is still run by the Estate. The houses along it are the grandest in the village, often four floors and several thousand square feet, where the staircase alone is half a day’s work and the upper-floor glass is the slow, careful part.

Court Lane, Calton Avenue and the eastern streets

East of the green the stock turns Edwardian: the eleven pairs of houses on Court Lane Gardens, the 1870s Dulwich Cottage Company terrace on Calton Avenue, and the runs along Pickwick Road, Aysgarth Road and the Burbage Road end. North Dulwich and West Dulwich stations bracket the area on the Thameslink loop, and the P4 bus runs the village spine, which is how most of our crews reach a job that has no parking of its own.

If your address sits a street or two outside this list, ring the office anyway. We cover the SE21 8 boundary into Dulwich Wood, Dulwich Hill over in SE22, and West Dulwich on the other side of College Road just as often.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until it is too late

Dulwich Village runs at our standard London pricing. The houses are grand, but the price is set by bedroom count, with kit, products and travel included. The slow heritage work, the original glass, the parquet, the stone surrounds, is part of the standard clean, not a surcharge bolted on after.

Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a reception room, or £115 for a whole two-bed’s carpeted area. Oven work, already in the standard clean, runs £77 single, £110 double and £114 on a 90cm range as a standalone, and most village kitchens have a double oven or a range. A part job is £30 per hour per cleaner. Those figures assume a house in normal lived-in shape; a long tenancy with heavy wear or a pet household costs more, and we say so on the phone, not after.

Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A clean to protect a five-week deposit on a village house is not really a decision. Most tenants only run that sum after they have tried, failed the check-out and lost the first round. The order is nearly always that way around, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win.

Every village booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent or clerk flags a cleaning issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate sits near 97%, but the guarantee is the point. There is a reason the agents working the village keep our number. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

It is worth being clear about which job you are buying, because three of them get muddled.

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, against the letting-agent benchmark, house empty, with the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner on a part job.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour per cleaner.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £22 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.

A Calton Avenue job from February

“We handed back a three-bed on Calton Avenue in February after eleven years, which is a long time to raise two children in one house. I was worried about the parquet in the hall, because we had let it go a bit, and the marble fireplace in the front room had a grey ring from years of winter fires. Monster sent three cleaners for the best part of a day. They worked the edge-grout on the parquet by hand, lifted the soot ring off the marble with something that did not touch the stone, and did the old window glass with nothing but water and a cloth. Pedder signed it off on the first walk and our deposit came back inside a fortnight.”
Frances, Calton Avenue SE21 7, February 2026

That is a fair example of the village pattern: a long family let, an estate-managed house, and the deductions hiding in the heritage detail rather than in obvious mess. The careful work mattered, but what turned it was the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, which is the thing most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it, and the month-end problem

Booking is quick. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the address, the floor count, the bedroom count and your move-out date. We price it in about three minutes.
2. We send back a fixed price and book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow more notice for an end-of-month or end-of-term slot.
3. House empty when we arrive: furniture out, belongings gone, rubbish cleared. We also run removals if you want the move and the clean on one booking, which helps on the village streets where parking is permit-only and tight.
4. The team arrives, two to four cleaners by the size of the house, with all kit: a descaler for the chrome, clean water for original glass, stone-safe cleaner for marble, and a step ladder for the high cornicing.
5. We email a dated photo report and an itemised invoice on headed paper at sign-off. Anything the clerk flags inside 48 hours, we come back and fix free.

A word on month-end. Like most of inner London, the village bunches its check-outs into the last few days of the month, and around here the school calendar piles onto that, so July goes first of all. Ring on the 29th for the 31st and you may be out of luck. Book early for those windows.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Dulwich Village?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Those are full fixed prices on the 57-point checklist, with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on every one. They hold whether the property is a flat on Calton Avenue or a house on Court Lane. Carpet and oven work is added on top, and a part job is £30 per hour per cleaner.

Do you clean the period houses on Dulwich Village street and College Road?

Yes, every week. The Georgian and Victorian houses along Dulwich Village street, College Road and Gallery Road are the core of our work in SE21 7. We bring clean water and microfibre for original window glass, a pH-neutral stone cleaner for marble and limestone fireplaces, and a soft brush for parquet edge-grout. Nothing acidic goes near a leaded pane or a stone surround.

What does the Dulwich Estate Scheme of Management mean for a move-out clean?

The Scheme, approved by the High Court in 1974, binds the freehold of most of the village and sets a maintenance standard the freeholder, the managing agent and the inventory clerk all read. The clerk hands a house back against that estate baseline rather than a council minimum, so the bar is higher. We leave the property to match it: cornicing dusted, parquet edge-grout cleaned, fireplace surround buffed, glass left uncoated. The Scheme itself is published on the Dulwich Estate website if you want the wording.

Is Dulwich Village in Southwark’s selective licensing scheme?

The village core is mostly not. Southwark’s selective licensing scheme runs from 1 November 2023 to 31 October 2028 and covers the Dulwich Hill and Dulwich Wood wards rather than the SE21 7 estate streets. Additional HMO licensing does apply right across the borough, so a house in multiple occupation here needs that one. Either way the licence is the landlord’s, and it changes nothing about the cleaning standard at check-out. The rules sit on Southwark’s property licensing pages.

How long does it take to clean a house off College Road?

A three-bed Victorian or Edwardian house runs six to eight hours with two or three cleaners. A larger four-storey villa near the Old College is a full day for three. The time goes on the staircase, the original window glass on the upper floors, and the parquet halls, not on the kitchen, which is usually the quickest room in a house this size.

Will you clean original window glass safely?

Yes. The older houses near the Picture Gallery often keep hand-blown crown or cylinder glass in their upper windows, which is mineral and sensitive. We use clean water and a soft microfibre on it, never a scale remover or vinegar near a leaded or lead-set edge. The frame channels and the box get a separate pass with a brush. That one discipline saves more deposits in this postcode than anything else we do.

How do you handle hard-water marks in SE21?

Thames Water across south London runs very hard, around 300 parts per million of calcium carbonate, because the supply comes up through chalk (Thames Water hardness data). On chrome, glass and ceramic we use a measured descaler with proper dwell time, then polish. On marble, limestone and original glass we never do, because acid etches them; those we hand-buff or do with clean water instead.

Do you clean the parquet floors in a Court Lane or Calton Avenue house?

Yes. We sweep, dust-mop and then go over oak parquet with a barely damp microfibre pad, never a wet mop, which lifts and darkens the blocks over time. The edge-grout between the blocks is hand-cleaned with a soft brush. We do not apply polish unless the owner asks, and a full professional re-polish is a separate job we quote on its own.

Can you treat the soot ring on a marble fireplace?

Yes. A few winters of open fires leave a halo on a marble or limestone surround that a household wipe will not touch. We use a stone-safe pH-neutral cleaner and hand-buff it dry the same day. We never put an acidic descaler on natural stone, which is the mistake that turns a soot mark into permanent etching and a real deduction.

Are you insured, and who are you?

We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, a London end-of-tenancy crew trading since 2014. Public liability cover sits at £5m and we send the certificate to managing agents on request. Estate-managed houses and the agents who let them usually want it on file, so we keep a copy ready to forward.

Which letting agents do you work with around Dulwich Village?

We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London. Around the village that means regular work with Harvey & Wheeler, at 33 Dulwich Village for over 160 years, plus Pedder, KFH and the Knight Frank and Foxtons Dulwich desks that handle the larger College Road and Court Lane lets. Tell us the agent when you book and we brief the team on which clerk checks what.

Does the property need to be empty when you clean?

Yes, empty is strongly preferred. Furniture left behind blocks access to the skirtings, the built-in cupboards and the floors, and it leaves a question mark on the check-out the clerk will note. A single piece for the next tenant can be worked around, but the more that stays, the less complete the hand-back.

How much notice do you need to book?

Usually two to three days around the village, and same-week slots are common from Tuesday to Thursday. Friday move-outs and the last few days of the month fill first, because tenancies bunch their end dates there, so give a little more notice for those. If a team is finishing nearby in SE21 we can sometimes fit a same-day job, so it is worth ringing either way.

What if my landlord disputes the clean after a re-clean?

Escalate it to your deposit scheme. Our itemised invoice on headed paper, the dated photo report and the re-clean record are all admissible evidence, and a tenant with a full professional-clean paper trail very rarely loses. The route runs through your protection scheme, whether that is the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, the DPS or mydeposits, and Shelter’s deposit guidance walks through the steps if it comes to that.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Dulwich Village

Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Dulwich Village, oven cleaning in Dulwich Village and domestic cleaning in Dulwich Village.