The clerk who walks a flat on Earlham Grove starts at the meter cupboard in the communal hall, because on a road where nearly every house was cut into three or four, the first argument is always about what is yours and what is the building’s. We have been cleaning move-outs on this street since 2014, and the job here is not a terrace job. It is a carved-up villa job. Price is £30 per hour per cleaner, or a fixed quote by flat size, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover Earlham Grove end to end inside E7 9, including the room-let houses and the flats above the Woodgrange Road corner. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Newham.
A solicitors’ street that nobody left alone
Earlham Grove is one road, and this page is about that road rather than the ward around it. Worth saying plainly, because the wider Forest Gate South picture is a different page and a different housing story.
The street went up on the Gurney estate, roughly 1870 to 1890, on land north of Romford Road belonging to the Quaker banking family whose Norfolk seat was Earlham Hall. That is where the name comes from. The Gurneys built later than the streets around them and they built bigger: detached and semi-detached houses alongside the terraced ones, aimed at solicitors, merchants and business people rather than the City clerks who filled the smaller roads nearby. The result is a run of houses that are, by Newham standards, unusually large.
Nothing about that survived the twentieth century. The houses were the wrong size for the way people actually wanted to live, so they were cut up. Number 175 started life as Earlham Hall in the 1870s, went on to hold John Curwen’s Tonic Sol-Fa College and then the Metropolitan Academy of Music, and is a church now. The West Ham Synagogue stood at 93 to 95 from 1897 until 2004, the first in Essex, with Adler Court on the site today. Number 16 took in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The pattern held for the ordinary houses too: flats, bedsits, hostels, shared houses, supported housing.
The houses were the wrong size for the way people wanted to live, so they were cut up.
Which is the whole point for a cleaner. You are not walking into a Victorian house. You are walking into a fragment of one, with a kitchen where a kitchen was never meant to be and a bathroom stolen from the end of a bedroom, and the clerk’s report is written against that fragment.
What happens to a drawing room when you put a wall through it
Go into a first-floor flat here and you can usually read the original plan straight off the ceiling. A cornice runs the length of what is now two rooms and stops dead where a stud wall meets it. A ceiling rose sits a third of the way across a bedroom instead of in the middle. A window is cut in half by a partition, so one room has a window and a half and the next has none. None of this is a fault. All of it is a cleaning problem, because dust collects along every one of those junctions and a clerk with a torch finds them without trying.
The rooms are also big, which catches people out on price and on time. A two-bed conversion here can hold more floor and more wall than a three-bed in a newer block, the skirting is deeper, the hallway is longer, and there is often a return or a half-landing belonging to your flat alone. When somebody rings and says “it’s only a two-bed”, we ask which house and which floor, because the answer moves the job by a couple of hours.
Then the kitchen. In most of these conversions it was fitted into a room that was never a kitchen, so the extraction is an afterthought: a recirculating hood with a charcoal filter nobody has changed, or a duct punched out through the side return. The inside of that canopy carries an amber film a wipe does not touch.
“Five of us in one of the big houses near the Woodgrange Road end, four years, and the kitchen was the whole risk. It had a hood that just blew the air back at you and the ceiling above it had gone the colour of weak tea. Monster took the canopy apart, soaked the filter, and did the ceiling by hand. Two of them, most of a day. We had braced ourselves for a fight over it and the report came back with nothing on the kitchen at all.”
Dan, Earlham Grove E7 9, February 2026
The communal hall, and whose deposit pays for it
This is the argument that belongs to this street more than any other, and it is worth understanding before your check-out rather than during it.
When a house is cut into flats, the front door, the hall, the stairs, the landing and the meter cupboard usually stay in common. Nobody’s tenancy covers them. In practice they are cleaned by whoever the freeholder pays, which on a fair number of these houses means occasionally, or never. So the clerk walks up a stair carpet with four years of grit in it, past a meter cupboard full of junk mail, and arrives at your flat door already in a mood.
What we clean is your side of the line: the inside face of your flat door, the frame, the threshold, and everything beyond it. What we will not do is let a communal problem land on your deposit. If the report tries it, the answer is in the lease, and the lease almost always says the hall is not yours. Ask the clerk to show you the clause. That conversation is usually over in a minute.
The meter cupboard is its own small trap. In a lot of these houses the meters for every flat sit together under the stairs, and tenants store things in there because nowhere else in a converted flat has any storage. Bikes, boxes, a hoover. It is not your cupboard, and anything of yours left in it on the day you go is fair game for a removal charge. Clear it the night before.
The licence your landlord holds, and why the clerk reads it
Newham runs the biggest selective licensing scheme in the country and has done for years. The current designation came into force on 1 June 2023 and runs to 31 May 2028. It covers 22 of the 24 wards, with only Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park left out, and Forest Gate South is squarely inside it (Newham Council selective licensing). A licence runs to £750 for up to five years. If your landlord lets a flat on Earlham Grove, they should hold one.
A dirty oven does not breach a licence. Nobody loses a licence over a grill pan. But the scheme means the council holds a file on the property and the landlord has a renewal to think about, and a house cut into four flats on a road full of houses cut into four flats draws more attention than a family home in a quieter borough would. Agents letting here know that. It makes them careful, and careful agents brief careful clerks.
Here is the part worth knowing. Earlham Grove is not in a conservation area. People assume it is, because the houses look the part and because Forest Gate has two of them, Woodgrange Estate, designated back in July 1976 across Hampton Road, Osborne Road, Claremont Road and Windsor Road, and Forest Gate Town Centre. Earlham Grove is in neither. No Article 4 direction ever sat over these houses, which is a fair part of why the subdivision here went as far as it did while the four Woodgrange roads kept their front gardens and their windows.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a move-out on this road
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault eviction is gone. Every assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a rolling periodic tenancy, so the fixed term you signed has quietly become something you can end on two months’ notice at any point in the year.
Your cleaning obligation did not move an inch.
What moved is the rhythm. This road has always turned over fast, because room-lets and shared houses turn over fast, and now the leaving dates are scattered through the month instead of bunching on the last three days. That is better for us and better for you, mostly. The catch is that people who used to know their end date six months out now decide with eight weeks’ notice, and they ring us with four days. Book the clean the week you give notice, not the week you pack.
Chalk, chrome and a shower built into a bedroom corner
Thames Water classes every drop it supplies as hard, off the chalk and limestone the Thames valley sits on, and east London sits at the top end of its own scale (Thames Water hardness). In a normal flat that is an annoyance. In a converted flat on this road it is the second most reliable deduction after the oven, and the reason is the carve-up again.
Bathrooms here were fitted where there was room, not where there should be one. That usually means an enclosure squeezed into the corner of what was a bedroom, an extractor ducted a long way to an outside wall or not ducted at all, and a window that either does not exist or is a small one on a cold side. Warm wet air, nowhere to go, hard water. The chalky film sets on the shower head, the screen runner and the tap base inside a fortnight, and it sets into a soft grey bloom on the cold reveal if there is a window.
We soak the fittings with a measured weak acid and give it the dwell time it actually needs, which is longer than most people have the patience for, then buff dry by hand the same day. Old chrome gets nothing abrasive near it. Where a bloom has gone into porous plaster rather than sitting on the paint, we photograph it and flag it, because that is a fabric problem for the landlord and not a cleaning miss for you to pay for.
“Ground floor, the one with the big bay, three years on my own while I was nursing at Newham General. The bathroom was tucked in the corner of the back room with a fan that went nowhere and the shower screen had gone properly cloudy. I’d scrubbed at it for a whole weekend and got nothing. They soaked it, left it, came back to it and the runner came up like new. The clerk didn’t even mention the bathroom.”
Priya, Earlham Grove E7 9, March 2026
The 57 things we go through, room by room
Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built out of a decade of check-outs and tuned to what actually gets flagged. You get a copy with the confirmation. Here is the shape of it, with the bits this road makes harder called out.
Kitchen
The oven is stripped rather than wiped: racks into a soaking tank, door glass split so the brown film between the panels comes out, interior, fan and seals all done. Then the hood, which on these conversions is the job. Panel off where it lifts, filter out for an alkaline soak, housing scrubbed to clean metal, unit reset. Hob rings and knobs off and washed. Every cupboard inside, outside, on top and underneath, including the deep awkward corners a fitted-into-a-parlour kitchen always has. Fridge and freezer through, once you have defrosted them. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind get done, then put back. Washing machine drum, drawer out and scrubbed, and the door seal, which is the first thing a clerk opens. Sink, taps and plughole descaled. Grout scrubbed. Bin washed. Floor last, after the dust has settled.
Bathroom
Scale off the taps, head, screen and tiles first, carefully where the chrome is original. Grout scrubbed as far as honest effort goes, and photographed first where it is past saving. Toilet inside, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges and behind the pedestal. Shower screen both sides, tracks and sealant bead. Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow, plughole. Mirror and cabinet, and behind them. Extractor grille pulled where it comes away, because the dust load in there looks brown when it comes out. Cold reveal treated with a fungicidal wash where a bloom has formed. Floor into the corners and behind the pan.
Bedrooms, reception and the hall that is yours
Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, which here is deep and runs a long way. Cornice and ceiling rose dusted by hand with a soft brush, including the stretch where the cornice runs into a partition and stops, which is a real dust trap and a real giveaway that nobody cleaned it. Original timber window boxes hand-wiped rather than sprayed, because the putty lifts. Bay underside and the sill, which holds more than anything else in the flat. Cast-iron fireplace surrounds dusted, never sprayed. Radiators behind, under and on top. Light fittings, switches, sockets, entryphone handset. Internal doors both sides with the handles, the hinges and the flat top edge. Carpets vacuumed in two directions and spot-treated; a full shampoo is an add-on. Hard floors washed with the right product for what they are. Cobwebs out of the ceiling corners. Then a walk-through with a torch in low light, photographed room by room, before and after.
The photo pack is the part most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.
What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until it is too late
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio or single let room in a shared house | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £156 |
| 1-bed flat in a subdivided villa | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed conversion, upper floor | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed flat or a house back in single occupation | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed house or a full room-let house | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Odd-shaped or part job, priced by the hour | As needed | £30 per cleaner |
| Carpet shampoo add-on | Same visit | £36 a bedroom, £43 the reception, £115 a whole 2-bed |
| Oven add-on if that is all the agent flagged | 1-2 hours | £77 single, £110 double, £114 range 90cm |
Those assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long room-let tenancy, a pet, a smoker, or a kitchen nobody has properly touched since the last turnover costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than on the invoice.
Now the sums. Newham’s average private rent reached £1,910 a month in February 2026, up from £1,760 a year earlier, which is roughly an 8.5% rise and one of the sharpest in London (ONS private rent and house prices). Deposits are capped at five weeks’ rent, so on a flat at that rent your deposit is somewhere around £2,200 sitting in a scheme. Set £243 against £2,200 and the decision makes itself, but almost nobody runs that line until after they have tried a weekend with a mop, failed the check-out and lost the cheap round. We have a 97% first-time pass rate on these jobs, and every one carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, as long as you tell us inside the window and nobody has moved in. There is a reason agents send us work. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and across the years that has helped tenants keep £1.2m deposits recovered rather than handing it over on cleaning deductions.
Four jobs get muddled on the phone constantly. They are not the same thing and the right one is usually cheaper than the one people ask for.
- End of tenancy clean
- Built to pass a check-out and get a deposit back, judged against the check-in report, flat empty, with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it.
- Deep clean
- A full reset of a home you are keeping. Same graft, no inventory to answer to, no guarantee attached because there is no report to measure it against.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance with the same cleaner kept on, from £22 an hour weekly and £24 fortnightly.
- One-off team clean
- A team in for a single visit, £26 per cleaner an hour with a £186 minimum, which is two cleaners for three hours plus the £30 kit charge. Handy for a room-let house between tenants.
Booking it, and the three things to tell us
Ring 0333 555 2076 and we price it on the call. Three things make the quote accurate on this street, and people leave all three out.
- Which house and which floor. “A two-bed on Earlham Grove” tells us almost nothing on its own. The houses here are different sizes, and a second-floor flat with a return is a different job to a ground floor with the bay.
- Whether it is a whole flat or a room. If you are one of five in a shared house, say so, and say whether your agreement makes you liable for a share of the kitchen and bathroom. That is the single most common thing we have to unpick later.
- How we get in. Front door code, key safe, agent drop-off, or a neighbour. A team waiting on the pavement is time you pay for.
The rest is straightforward. We book you in, ideally the day before the check-out with a buffer. The flat needs to be empty and the meter cupboard cleared of anything of yours. We turn up with our own kit, do the checklist, and send the photo pack and a written report the same evening. You keep that pack. It is your evidence if the check-out tries to deduct, and it is worth more than any argument you can make afterwards. Parking is permit-controlled in the controlled hours, so tell us the arrangement when you book rather than leaving us to find out on the day.
Questions we get asked
How much is end of tenancy cleaning on Earlham Grove?
A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Most of this road is flats carved out of the old villas, so the two-bed at £243 is the job we quote most. If your flat is an odd shape, and plenty here are, we price by the hour instead at £30 per cleaner. Carpet shampoo and oven add-ons are priced at the booking call.
Do you clean the communal hallway and the shared stairs?
Not as part of your flat clean, and you should not be charged for them either. The communal hall, the stairs, the meter cupboard and the front door of the building are the freeholder’s responsibility in almost every lease on this road. What we do clean is your side: the inside face of your own flat door, your own threshold, and the frame. If a clerk tries to put communal grime on your deposit, ask them to point at the lease clause. Usually that is the end of it.
Is Earlham Grove covered by Newham’s landlord licensing scheme?
Yes. Newham’s selective licensing designation came into force on 1 June 2023 and runs to 31 May 2028. It covers 22 of the borough’s 24 wards; only Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park sit outside it. Earlham Grove is in Forest Gate South ward, which is inside the scheme, so a landlord letting a flat on this road should hold a licence. A licence costs £750 for up to five years.
Is the street in a conservation area?
No, and this is worth getting right because people assume it is. Newham has two conservation areas in E7: Woodgrange Estate, designated in July 1976 and covering Hampton Road, Osborne Road, Claremont Road and Windsor Road, and Forest Gate Town Centre. Earlham Grove is not in either. The houses are the same era and often grander, but there is no Article 4 direction over them, which is a large part of why so many were subdivided so freely.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change what I have to clean?
No. The Act went live on 1 May 2026, Section 21 is abolished and every assured shorthold tenancy has converted to a periodic one. Your cleaning obligation is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing: people leave on two months’ notice now rather than at a fixed term end, so move-outs on this road are more spread out and less predictable than they used to be. Book earlier than feels necessary.
How long does a flat on Earlham Grove take?
A one-bed conversion runs about four to five hours with two cleaners. A two-bed across an upper floor takes five to seven. The rooms here are bigger than the flat count suggests, because they were carved out of drawing rooms, so a two-bed on this road takes longer than a two-bed in a modern block. We work to the checklist rather than to the clock, and we tell you on the phone if we think your flat is at the long end.
My flat is one room of a shared house. Can you clean just that?
Yes. A lot of the stock on this road is let room by room, and a room-only check-out is a real job we do often. We price it by the hour at £30 per cleaner rather than pretending it is a studio. Tell us at the booking call whether your agreement makes you responsible for a share of the kitchen and bathroom, because that changes the scope and the time, and it is the single most common thing people get wrong when they ring.
What does the hard water do to the bathroom?
Thames Water classes everything it supplies as hard, and the chalk under the Thames valley puts east London at the top of its own scale. In a converted flat that usually means a shower fitted into what was a bedroom corner, with a small enclosure, poor ventilation and a chalky film on the screen runner and the head within a fortnight. We soak the fittings with a weak acid, give it proper dwell time, then buff dry by hand. Nothing abrasive goes near old chrome.
Do I have to be there?
No. Most people on this road leave a key with the agent or in a key safe by the front steps. Tell us which, and tell us whether the building’s front door has a code, because a team standing on the pavement waiting for a neighbour to let them in is time you are paying for.
What happens if the check-out flags something?
Ring us inside 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no charge, provided the flat is still as we left it and nobody has moved in. That is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and it is on every booking. About 97% of our jobs pass first time, so the guarantee mostly sits unused, but it is the reason people book us rather than the cheapest quote.
Can you guarantee I get my deposit back?
No, and be wary of anyone who says they can. The check-out marks paint, damage and the landlord’s own furniture, and we do not touch any of that. What we stand behind is the cleaning line. We photograph every room before and after, we send you the pack the same evening, and if the cleaning is questioned we come back. Over the years that evidence has helped tenants recover £1.2m deposits recovered from cleaning deductions.
Get a price
Call 0333 555 2076. Give us the house number, the floor, the size and the check-out date and we price it in about three minutes. Out of hours, email [email protected] and someone rings you back first thing. A couple of photos of the kitchen and the bathroom sharpen the quote a lot, and on this road they usually save you money rather than cost it, because the flats are often in better shape than their owners fear. Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, cleaning Forest Gate move-outs since 2014. And if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway.