The first thing a clerk does in a Pepys Estate bathroom is run a thumbnail along the silicone under the window, because the black bloom that creeps along that timber-to-tile seam is the most reliable deduction in this corner of Deptford. Get that wrong and the rest of the report reads against you. So end of tenancy cleaning in the Evelyn ward has to be built for the person writing that report, run to a fixed checklist, priced at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out itself. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, and we have worked SE8 5 since 2014. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover the Evelyn ward in full: SE8 5 across the Pepys Estate, Evelyn Street and Sayes Court, plus the SE16 riverside edge along Plough Way toward Surrey Quays. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lewisham.
The report you are really being marked against
Start with the document, because almost nobody does. When you moved in, an inventory clerk walked the flat and wrote down the state of every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the kitchen and bathroom logged as clean or as new. That was true on the day, because the flat had just had a professional clean before you got the keys. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares the two reports line by line. Anything worse than the move-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is a deduction. You are not being judged against tidy. You are being judged against the clean somebody paid for before you arrived, which is why a mop and a free Sunday rarely closes the gap.
The money is real, and on the Evelyn ward DIY check-outs we get called in to rescue the deductions land in a familiar shape: the oven, the bathroom silicone, the calcium on the taps, the gaps behind the white goods, the carpet wear strip in a narrow hallway. Put a few of those against a one-bed deposit and the maths makes itself. Most people only run the maths after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round. That order is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win.
Why is the clerk so thorough here? Because someone is accountable for that deposit while it sits in a scheme, and the agent is on the hook for it, so the walk is genuinely adversarial. The clerk is paid to find faults rather than wave you through. That is not unfair. It just means you turn up with a clean that survives a torch in a dark hallway, and with a written record of it.
What 1 May 2026 changed for Evelyn move-outs
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to end.
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. A deduction is still recovered through the protected scheme dispute or a signed agreement, and it still leans on the inventory photographs, the clerk’s notes and your cleaning invoice. What changed is timing. Let people leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed date and the move-outs spread out and get harder to predict, which is why the slot you want goes if you wait. Book the clean earlier than you used to.
The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The timing did.
Why your landlord had to register the flat with Lewisham
Evelyn is the only Lewisham ward that touches the Thames, a thin strip of north Deptford on the south bank, and it sits inside the borough’s selective licensing scheme. Evelyn falls in Designation 2, alongside Crofton Park, Ladywell, Lee Green and Sydenham. The scheme came into force on 1 July 2024 and runs for five years, to 30 June 2029, and the council charges a £640 licence fee per let, payable in two instalments, with a discount for accredited landlords. One quirk catches people out: the scheme works to the ward boundaries that existed before the May 2022 changes, so a flat near the edge can be in or out for licensing reasons that no longer match the map. Lewisham’s own postcode checker settles it. The current designation and any updates sit on the Lewisham selective licensing page.
Privately let flats inside Aragon Tower, the Pepys low-rise blocks, the Evelyn Street terraces and the newer riverside units mostly fall under it. What the licence does not do is change the inventory clean. The condition standard is set by the agent and the freeholder, not the council. The officers can inspect against the licence conditions and the gas and electrical paperwork, but the check-out clerk photographs to the inventory, and that is the document that decides your deposit. If the deduction goes to dispute, the adjudicator reads the check-in photos, the check-out notes and the invoice. We send a written agent-facing report by email at the end of every job, which is the cleaning side of that file.
What Thames Water leaves on the chrome
Supply across SE8 is Thames Water, and it is very hard. Their own figures put South East England in the hard band and call this stretch very hard, comfortably over 280 mg/l of calcium carbonate (Thames Water hardness). In a flat that means a calcium film rebuilds on the shower head, the screen runner, the tap base and the kettle element within a fortnight of the last proper descale. The clerk knows to look. They run a thumbnail down the tap, hold the shower screen edge-on to the light, pull the head in close. A cloth and a kitchen spray do nothing to it. We carry an acid descaler, leave it to dwell, rinse twice and polish the chrome separately afterwards. Hard-water limescale is one of the most common deductions on this patch precisely because the off-the-shelf approach cannot shift it.
The other moisture problem is the bathroom-window seam itself. A lot of the Pepys flats have a small timber-framed casement above a tiled splash, and tenants who dry washing on indoor airers over a winter throw condensation onto that reveal at a rate the building was never designed for. The silicone catches a black bloom along the line where timber meets tile. Spray and wipe leaves it grey. We poultice the seam with a dilute bleach paste, leave it twenty minutes, then scrub by hand and rinse, and the radiator behind the towel rail gets a steam pass if the wall above it is showing a condensation strip.
A cloth and a kitchen spray do nothing to a fortnight of Thames Water on chrome.
Evelyn Street to the river: the stock changes every few hundred yards
Evelyn ward is small, a little over a square kilometre, but the housing turns over completely as you walk it from Evelyn Street down to the water. One method does not pass all of it, so we work it as three kinds of property, each failing the check-out for its own reasons.
The Pepys Estate, on the river end
The estate dominates the bank. Aragon Tower stands at the heart of it, rebuilt and extended by Berkeley to twenty-nine storeys with penthouses on top and river-view glazing, sold private after the regeneration, while Daubeney Tower and Eddystone Tower stayed as social housing. Around the towers run the low-rise blocks and the infill terraces. The flats here fail on three things, in the order they cost us time: the bathroom-window silicone bloom, the kitchen extractor cowling above the small four-ring hob where the metal grease filter blanks within a year, and the shared stairwell scuff band at chest height where residents lean waiting for the lift. We wipe that band the length of the flight on the resident’s own door run, because that is the part the clerk reads as your contribution rather than the building’s.
Evelyn Street and Sayes Court, the terraced middle
Inland from the towers the ward picks up older terraced stock running along Evelyn Street and the streets dropping toward Grove Street and Sayes Court Park, the surviving fragment of the diarist John Evelyn’s old garden. These houses fail differently: the original timber casement frames that hand-wipe rather than spray-clean, the picture-rail dust, the soot residue on a chimney breast where an old fireplace has been reopened. The window frames in this band take slow, careful work, not a fast pass with a cloth. Folded into the same run is Deptford Landings, the large Lendlease scheme on Evelyn Street with its linear park, a thousand-odd flats and townhouses where the failure points shift again, to engineered-oak skirting and the silicone around new shower screens.
The Plough Way riverside, toward Surrey Quays
At the eastern edge, toward Greenland Dock and Surrey Quays, sit the newer riverside blocks: Marine Wharf and the Cannon Wharf side along Plough Way, Berkeley-built courtyard flats with floor-to-ceiling glazing. A point worth knowing is that a lot of these carry SE16 postcodes even though they sit on the Evelyn side of the line, a leftover of where the postcode boundary and the ward boundary part company along the dock. These units fail on the trim silicone around patio doors and on the open-plan kitchen-living return where one room does the work of two. We weight the kitchen and bathroom heavily wherever you are in the ward, because that is where the deductions actually live.
Not sure which side of the SE8 and SE16 line you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds, and we cover both.
The 57 things we go through, room by room
Every Evelyn booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks on this patch flag. The full list comes with the job. Here is the shape of it, with the kitchen and bathroom weighted hardest because that is where the money goes.
It helps to be clear which clean you are buying, because three different jobs get muddled.
- End of tenancy clean
- The handover clean, built to pass the inventory and release a deposit, with the flat empty and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it. This is the one this page is about.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are staying in. No formal standard to hit, no clerk reading it afterwards.
- Regular clean
- Ongoing maintenance to keep a place tidy week to week, a different rhythm and a lower rate.
- Domestic clean
- A regular domestic visit, the recurring service rather than the one-off move-out job.
The kitchen, where most of it is decided
The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak in a tank, the door glass comes apart so the brown film between the panels lifts out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. Hob and burners come off, knobs off and washed. The extractor cowling is degreased inside and the metal filter pulled and soaked. Every cupboard inside, outside, on top and underneath, including the deep awkward corners. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once defrosted, seals scrubbed where mould blooms in the rubber. The white goods come out so the gaps behind and under them are done, then go back. The washing machine drawer comes out and the door seal gets scrubbed, since that grey rubber gasket is the first thing a clerk opens. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled with proper dwell time. Tiles and grout brushed, splashback polished. Skirtings, light fittings, switches and sockets. Inside of the windows and the frame edges by hand. Bin washed out, floor mopped last once the dust has settled.
The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong
Calcium off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first, with the acid soak and the dwell time the hard water needs. Then the toilet done properly: bowl, under the rim, base, hinge bolts and behind the pan. Shower screen both sides, the runner and the sealant bead. Bath, taps and the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole. Mirror, cabinet, shaver socket and the extractor grille, which looks brown when you pull it. The silicone seam at the screen, the bath edge and the bathroom-window reveal, with the bleach poultice on any bloom. Towel rail and the radiator behind it. Floor mopped, edges done by hand.
Bedrooms, living rooms and everything between
- Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in, rails and runners wiped
- Skirtings, architraves, internal doors both sides with handles, hinges and the flat top edge nobody dusts
- Window glass and frame edges, the original timber casements on the terrace stock hand-wiped slowly
- Radiators front, back and between the fins
- Light fittings, switch plates and the inside of any dome shade
- Carpets vacuumed in two directions and spot-treated; full shampoo is an add-on
- Hard floors washed with the right product for the material, engineered oak handled gently
- Behind beds, sofas and freestanding furniture
Then the shared parts the clerk reads as yours: the resident’s own door run on the stairwell, the chest-height wear band, the hallway and lobby skirtings, the narrow internal hallway carpet wear strip in the Pepys flats steam-wanded. Last of all a final walk with a torch in low light, because daylight hides the marks the clerk will find.
What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time
These are full prices for the agent-approved end of tenancy service, fixed at quote rather than charged by the hour, with the 57-point checklist applied and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee built in. There is no VAT add-on, no fuel surcharge, and no extra for an upper-floor walk-up. Worth saying for the towers: no extra for a slow lift either. A studio runs from £156, a one-bed Pepys flat or an Evelyn Street terrace conversion from £207, and a two-bed from £243. A three-bed, the family unit or a Deptford Landings townhouse, comes in from £339, and a four-bed from £425. Where a full clean is overkill, a light end-of-tenancy top-up runs at £30 per hour per cleaner. The riverside units along Plough Way occasionally price ten or twenty pounds above base because of the patio-door silicone and the engineered floor through an open-plan reception, and we say so on the phone, not after.
Add-ons sit on top and stay separate so you only pay for what you need. Carpet shampoo is £36 per bedroom, £43 per living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. Oven cleaning is inside the standard clean already, but as a standalone it is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range. If the rest of the flat is fine and only the cooker let you down, a standalone oven cleaning covers it on its own, and the most common extra line on a deposit deduction, the carpet, is what the carpet cleaning add-on is for on the same visit.
Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 against a deposit several times that is not really a decision, and the average private rent across Lewisham was about £1,810 a month in early 2026, so the deposits here are not small. Our pass rate across local jobs sits near 97%, but the 48-hour re-clean guarantee is the real point: if the agent or clerk flags any cleaning issue inside 48 hours, we come back and put it right at no charge, provided the flat is in the state we left it with nobody moved in. There is a reason the agents on this patch know us.
Over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and we are on the books of 300+ letting agents. That number is really the whole job: money that stays with the tenant instead of the landlord.
A Marine Wharf job from April
“We were a couple sharing a two-bed at Marine Wharf, off Plough Way, three years in, both working from home so the place had been lived in hard. The patio-door silicone and the glass had me worried, and the open kitchen had a film on the splashback I could never quite get off. Two cleaners came for about seven hours, descaled the lot, did the carpets in the bedrooms on top, and left a written report for the agent the same day. Greenland’s clerk passed it first time and the full deposit was back inside two weeks.”
Priya, Marine Wharf SE16, April 2026
That is a fair example of the riverside pattern: a longer let, an open-plan kitchen carrying a film nobody can shift with a sponge, the new silicone the clerk checks first, and an agent who actually reads the report. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated report that went out with the invoice, which is the part most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.
Booking it, and the lift problem
Booking is quick. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the bedroom count and your move-out date, and we come back inside the hour during office hours with a fixed quote. No site visit unless the layout is unusual. You confirm, we block the date and the team, and you pay by card on the day, bank transfer in advance, or cash if that is easier. The team turns up with all the kit and chemistry, the descaler for the hard water and the poultice for the bathroom silicone included, and we send the written agent-facing report by email at sign-off.
One honest note for the Pepys towers and the riverside blocks: the lift. A single goods lift serving a stack of flats on a busy move-out day is the slowest part of the job, and if it is out, a job that should take six hours can sprawl. Tell us at the booking stage whether there is a concierge, a key safe or an agent drop-off, and whether the lift is reliable, so we send the right team and the right amount of time. If you want the move and the clean on one booking we also handle removals, which genuinely helps when several van trips up one lift turn into an afternoon.
If your address sits a street or two outside the Evelyn ward, ring anyway. We cover the neighbouring patches for end of tenancy too: the Lewisham hub lists the lot, and the closest siblings are Convoys Wharf on the river immediately north, Deptford Bridge up the creek to the south, and New Cross Gate on the western edge.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in the Evelyn ward?
From £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed Pepys flat or an Evelyn Street terrace conversion, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. Carpet shampoo and oven add-ons are priced on top. The riverside units along Plough Way occasionally price ten or twenty pounds above base because of the patio-door silicone and the engineered floor.
How long does the clean take?
A one-bed Pepys flat takes two cleaners about five to seven hours. A two-bed runs six to eight. An Evelyn Street terrace with original timber casements is closer to seven to nine because the frames are hand-wiped. We work to the checklist, not the clock.
Do you guarantee my deposit back?
We cannot guarantee the deposit, because the inventory has lines we do not touch, like paint, wear and tear and the landlord’s furniture. What we guarantee is the cleaning: if a clerk flags any cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we come back at no charge and put it right. About 97% of our jobs pass the inventory first time.
Is the Evelyn ward in the Lewisham selective licensing scheme?
Yes. Evelyn sits in Designation 2 of the borough scheme, which came into force on 1 July 2024 and runs to 30 June 2029. The licence fee is £640 per let, payable in two instalments. The scheme works to the pre-May 2022 ward boundaries, so the council’s postcode checker is the safe way to confirm a flat near the edge. The licence does not change the inventory clean standard, which the agent and freeholder set.
Do you work inside Aragon Tower?
Yes. The Pepys Estate towers are a steady part of our SE8 5 work, Aragon Tower especially since the upper floors became private leasehold after the Berkeley rebuild. We know the three points the clerks photograph first: the bathroom-window silicone, the kitchen extractor cowling and the shared stairwell wear band.
Do you handle the riverside flats at Marine Wharf and along Plough Way?
Yes, and a lot of them carry SE16 postcodes even though they sit on the Evelyn side of the line. These newer units fail on the patio-door silicone and the open-plan kitchen return rather than on period detail, and we weight the clean to match. Tell us the development when you book.
What about the bathroom-window mould on the Pepys flats?
The flats with a small timber casement above a tiled splash catch a black bloom along the silicone where timber meets tile, under any tenant who dries washing indoors over a winter. We use a dilute bleach poultice, leave it twenty minutes, then scrub by hand and rinse. Spray and wipe will not lift it. The radiator behind the towel rail gets a steam pass if the wall above shows a condensation strip.
How bad is the limescale on the chrome here?
Thames Water across SE8 is very hard, comfortably over 280 mg/l of calcium carbonate, so the calcium rebuilds on shower heads, screen runners, taps and kettle elements within a fortnight. It needs an acid soak with dwell time and then a polish, which is why hard-water deductions are so common on this patch. Our team carries all of it.
Do you handle the original timber casements on the Evelyn Street terraces?
Yes. Those frames hand-wipe rather than spray-clean, and they take longer than a modern unit. If the lease note says listed building or conservation area, tell us at the booking stage so we send a team that has done period stock before.
Do I need to be there on the day?
No. Most of our Evelyn clients leave a key with the agent, the concierge or in a key safe. We send a written check-out report by email when we finish.
Do you bring all the cleaning products?
Yes, everything, from the acid descaler for the Thames Water chrome to the bleach poultice for the bathroom silicone. You do not need to leave anything behind.
What if my landlord uses a specific inventory company?
Tell us the firm when you book. We have worked with most of the clerks who walk SE8 properties, and we know which ones lean strict on which categories, so we brief the team accordingly.
How quickly can you book me in?
Usually 48 to 72 hours’ notice in the Evelyn ward. Same-day work is sometimes possible if a team is finishing nearby on the SE8 patch, so phone the office to ask. Friday and end-of-month slots fill earliest, and since 1 May 2026 the move-outs spread out more, so book early.
Does the property need to be empty?
Empty is strongly preferred. Furniture left behind blocks access and leaves uncertainty at the check-out. A single piece for the next tenant can be worked around, but the more that stays, the less complete the clean can be.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Evelyn
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Evelyn, oven cleaning in Evelyn and domestic cleaning in Evelyn.