End of tenancy cleaning in Exmouth Market

On the Clerkenwell Close loft conversions the first thing an inventory clerk reaches for is the Crittall steel casement in the front bay, because a previous tenant has usually painted the lower hopper hinge shut and the check-in report marked it as a working part. That single item decides more Exmouth Market deposits than the oven does. We have handed flats back around this pedestrianised food street and the wider Clerkenwell design quarter since 2014, so we clean to the clerk writing the report, not to a generic idea of tidy. Fixed quote, or £30 per hour per cleaner on a part job, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover EC1R across the Exmouth Market strip, Clerkenwell Close, Tysoe Street, Rosoman Street, Skinner Street, Pine Street, Wilmington Square and the Mount Pleasant edge of Farringdon Road. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Islington.

The report that quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a check-in report describing every surface, usually with photographs and usually with the words “new” or “as new” against the kitchen, the floor and the window frames. Those words were true on the day, because the flat had just been professionally cleaned. At the end a different clerk walks it again and compares line by line, and anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely gets you there in EC1R.

Exmouth Market is a particular pocket, and the property mix is unlike most of the borough. Three stocks sit within three streets of each other, and your deposit gets docked on a different short list depending on which one you are in. The loft conversions along Clerkenwell Close and Skinner Street, carved out of nineteenth-century jewellers’ and watchmakers’ workshops in the 2000s, fail on exposed-brick mortar dust, seal marks on the polished-concrete floor where a heavy desk has stood, and those Crittall steel frames. The shop-with-flat-above stock on the market parade itself, reached by a side door and a steep dog-leg stair, fails on extractor grease drawn up from the restaurant kitchens below and on the second-turn stair runner. The Georgian and Victorian terraces and conversion flats on Tysoe Street, Rosoman Street and around Wilmington Square fail on picture-rail dust and on light-well brick in the semi-basements.

The money is not abstract. On the DIY hand-backs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a familiar pattern: the oven, the grout and hard-water scale, the gaps behind the appliances, the stair carpet, marks on original plaster the tenant tried to wipe and made worse. Put that against a deposit above two thousand pounds and the sum makes itself. Most tenants only run it after they have tried, failed and lost the first round, which is a shame: the first round is the cheap one to win.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a Clerkenwell move-out

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault eviction is gone. Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a rolling periodic tenancy, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to run out.

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 is still capped at five weeks’ rent where the annual rent is under £50,000, and still has to be protected within thirty days under the Housing Act 2004. What changed is timing, and timing is the thing that bites in a corner like this one.

Exmouth Market and the design-district streets around it were already high churn: one-year company lets, young professionals and creatives, a lot of flats that turn over every spring. Let tenants leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and the hand-backs get more frequent and less predictable. From a landlord’s side the inventory walk now carries more weight, because the possession routes are narrower and the deposit dispute is the main lever left. The dull, self-funding takeaway: book the clean earlier than you used to, or the slot you want will be gone.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. What changed is timing.

Who licenses what around Exmouth Market

Exmouth Market sits in Clerkenwell ward, London Borough of Islington. Licensing matters because a licence creates a paper trail, and that makes a clerk walk the shared parts more carefully. Two schemes are live and one is only proposed, so it is worth being exact.

Selective licensing (one or two occupiers, or a single family)

Islington runs a selective scheme, but as of mid-2026 it covers only three wards: Finsbury Park, Tollington and Hillrise, from 20 May 2024 for five years. A 2025 consultation proposed adding several more wards, and Clerkenwell was named in that proposal, but the wards approved in October 2025 did not include Clerkenwell and even those have no confirmed start date yet. So a one-household let on Tysoe Street, on the market itself, or in a Clerkenwell Close loft is generally not under selective licensing right now.

Additional HMO licensing (three or four unrelated sharers)

This one is borough-wide and it is live. It started on 1 February 2026 and runs for five years, and Clerkenwell ward is fully inside it. The application fee is £900 plus £100 per letting, with small discounts for accredited landlords and for an EPC of A to C.

Mandatory HMO licensing (five or more occupiers, two or more households)

The national scheme, in force everywhere including EC1R. The larger loft shares and the bigger Tysoe Street splits can fall into this band.

What that means on the ground is simple. Licensed HMO common parts, the stairs, hallway, shared kitchen or bathroom, get walked as their own line items because the licence documents them, and we price them as standard rooms with no surcharge. The council’s own property licensing pages set out which flats need which licence; the cleaning standard at hand-back is the same whether a licence sits behind the door or not.

The 57 things we work through, street by street

Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local hand-backs and tuned to what the clerks who walk these streets actually test. The full list comes with the job. What changes door to door is the surface, and it changes a lot in three streets, so here is the shape of it with the local quirks folded in.

The kitchen, where most of the deposit goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak in a tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the cavity, fan, element and seals all get done. That film is the single most-flagged oven fault we see. Then the rest of the room: hob and burners off and washed, induction in the new-build infill and gas in the period flats. The extractor hood is degreased inside and out and the baffle filter soaked. On the market parade flats that filter is worse than anywhere, because it pulls vapour off the restaurant kitchens on the ground floor. Every cupboard inside and out, including the deep awkward-cornered ones. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under the dishwasher and washing machine are done, then put back. The washing-machine drum, the detergent drawer scrubbed, and the door seal, which is the first thing the clerk opens. Sink, taps and drainer descaled, because Thames Water never gives that a miss. Tiles and grout brushed, bin washed. Floor mopped last, and on the loft cohort the polished concrete gets a pH-neutral pass, never alkaline, because alkali etches the seal and makes the mark permanent.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first, with a careful hand on any original chrome. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving, so a clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already grey at check-in. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, base, hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
• Shower screen both sides, the runner track and the sealant bead
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
• Mirror and cabinet, and behind them where they come off the wall
• Extractor grille wiped, the dust load brown when it comes off
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin pedestal

Bedrooms, living areas and the awkward bits

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard, emptied, wiped and lined where you ask. Skirtings, door frames, doors, handles and finger plates. Light fittings, switches, and the original ceiling roses on the Georgian rooms, which hold years of dust and get checked. On the Tysoe Street and Wilmington Square terraces the picture rails sit at ceiling height and take a step-up and a slow hand. On the Clerkenwell Close and Skinner Street lofts the exposed-brick columns and the steel-truss roof structure get a soft brush and then a vacuum, never a spray, and the Crittall steel window sections get a barely-damp microfibre with the hinge knuckles worked separately and the bead line left alone. Radiators behind, under and on top; the cast-iron ones in the period flats take longer than a modern panel. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away.

Floors get the product the material wants. Polished concrete on the lofts is hand-buffed pH-neutral, the seal-mark areas worked with a microfibre rather than a wet pad. Original boards on the Tysoe Street uppers get a damp-not-wet pass. Where a tenancy writes in professional hot-water extraction on the carpets, which a fair few of the company lets around Rosoman Street do, that is a same-visit add-on. Then everything else: sockets, thermostat, intercom, internal doors both sides, and on the shop-flat-above stock the dog-leg side stair, runner edges and stringer dust by hand, the second turn in particular. A final walk-through with a torch in low light catches what daylight hides, and some of these deep loft floor-plates read fine at noon and rough at five o’clock.

The same teams cover the areas around us if your next flat is one street over. Farringdon down the hill and Angel up past Chadwell Street are both on the round, and the wider Clerkenwell patch runs into ours at the edges. The agents we see most on EC1R are the Clerkenwell specialists, Hurford Salvi Carr, Currell, Frank Harris and Winkworth on the corner of the market, and their clerks bring a stricter template to a loft than to a Georgian upper. We work to whichever bar the clerk turns up with.

Some of these deep loft floor-plates read fine at noon and rough at five o’clock.

What Thames Water does to Clerkenwell chrome

EC1R is on the Thames Water network and the supply is hard. London sits on chalk, so the water runs at roughly 293 parts per million of calcium carbonate, which is well into the very-hard band, and the Thames Water hardness page puts the wider EC district in the same range. Calcium builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for it. They run a thumbnail down the tap, they look at the screen edge-on against the light, they pull the shower head in close.

Scale that has set into chrome is not a quick job. It wants a dilute descaler, proper dwell time, then a rinse and a polish, and the generic kitchen spray a lot of exit cleans rely on will not shift it. On the older Clerkenwell fittings that also means no brute-force acid, because it will dull the plating. Grout is the other one, the line between a pass and a deduction more often than anything to do with carpet, and we scrub it rather than wipe it. The photograph we take before we start, dated and time-stamped, has settled more of these disputes than any argument. A clerk cannot charge a tenant for grout that was already dark in the check-in pictures.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

Exmouth Market and the Clerkenwell streets around it are not a premium-priced pocket for us, whatever the postcode looks like. You pay the standard London rate. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339, and a four-bed £425, each a fixed price with the 57-point agent-approved checklist applied and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee included. There is no VAT line, no fuel surcharge, no extra for the dog-leg stair or the polished-concrete pass on a loft. Where a full clean is overkill, a light top-up runs at £30 per hour per cleaner. The table below is the same figures with a rough duration, so you can see the shape of the day.

The add-ons are priced the same way. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted area. A single oven, already inside the standard clean and listed here only for reference, is £77; a double is £110; a 90cm range is £114. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or a flat nobody has deep-cleaned in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. No surprise lines on the invoice.

Now run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect a deposit north of two thousand pounds is not really a decision. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent or the inventory clerk flags a cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we come back and put it right at no charge, provided you tell us inside the window and nobody has moved in. Our pass rate across these jobs sits near a 97% first-time pass rate, but the guarantee is the point. There is a reason the Clerkenwell agents keep our number: we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

It helps to keep three jobs straight, because tenants book the wrong one and pay twice.

End-of-tenancy clean

The hand-back clean, built to pass the inventory and get a deposit back, flat empty, fixed price, the 48-hour guarantee on it.

Deep clean

A reset of a home you are staying in, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, charged at £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing upkeep on a rota, from £22 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly, the same cleaner kept on the home.

A Tysoe Street job from February

“Three years in the top two floors of a Georgian terrace on Tysoe Street, shared with one other tenant, both of us signed through Currell. It is a listed conversion, so the original ceiling roses and the picture rails were named individually on the check-in and I had genuinely no idea how to clean a nine-foot cornice without wrecking it. The washing-machine seal had gone black too. Monster sent two cleaners for a full day, did the plaster detail by hand off a step, descaled the whole bathroom, and photographed the grout before they touched it. Currell’s clerk came the next morning and passed it. Full deposit back, no deductions.”
Priya, Tysoe Street EC1R, February 2026

That is a fair example of the terrace pattern: a long tenancy, named period detail the tenant is scared to touch, a hard-water bathroom, and an agent who checks the plaster. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, which is the part most DIY hand-backs never have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it around a van-free street

The pedestrianised stretch of Exmouth Market is van-free through the working day, closed to traffic except for early trader access, so on a parade flat the kit gets carried in from a bay on Skinner Street or Rosoman Street, worth knowing before the day. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected]. Give us the postcode, the bedroom count, the property type, whether it is a loft, a market-parade flat, a Georgian upper or a modern infill, and the move-out date.
2. We confirm a fixed quote on the call. Carpet, oven type, the Crittall hand-pass, the polished-concrete work and the access quirks, van-free hours, the Islington visitor-permit rules on Skinner Street, key-safe or concierge handover, all get talked through then.
3. Written confirmation by email with the start time and the team lead’s name.
4. The team arrives, two to three cleaners depending on the size, working the checklist. Photos on completion for your deposit file if you want them.
5. The inventory clerk attends within 48 hours. Anything they flag on our checklist, we come back free. Anything outside it, a pre-existing paint chip on the Crittall or a curtain yellowed with age, is an inventory dispute rather than a clean issue, and we back you up with the photos.

Farringdon station is about eight minutes down Rosebery Avenue and Angel roughly ten via Chadwell Street, so if you are moving locally the crews are rarely far. If your hand-back is tomorrow, ring anyway.

Questions we get asked

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Exmouth Market?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. These are fixed prices on the standard London rate, not a premium, and they include the 57-point agent-approved checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Carpet shampoo and oven add-ons are priced separately, and a light top-up job runs at £30 per hour per cleaner.

Is Exmouth Market charged at a premium because it is central?

No. Despite the postcode and the design-district address, Exmouth Market and the surrounding Clerkenwell streets are on our standard London pricing. The Crittall steel window work on the loft cohort and the polished-concrete seal-mark hand-buff are included as standard, not billed as extras.

How long does the clean take?

A two-bed Clerkenwell Close loft runs six to eight hours with two cleaners, longer if the Crittall casements have not been opened in a year. A three-bed Tysoe Street upper is seven to nine. A one-bed shop-flat-above on the market parade, including the dog-leg side stair, is usually four to five. We do not rush by the clock; we work to the checklist.

Do you guarantee my deposit back?

We cannot guarantee the deposit, because the inventory has many lines we do not touch, such as paint, wear and tear, and the landlord’s own furniture. What we guarantee is the cleaning side: if the clerk flags a cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we come back at no charge under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Our 97% first-time pass rate is why that rarely happens.

Do you cover the Clerkenwell Close and Skinner Street loft conversions?

Yes. The old jewellers’ and watchmakers’ workshop conversions are part of our regular round. We bring the right kit for them, a soft brush for the exposed-brick mortar, a barely-damp microfibre for the Crittall steel sections, and a pH-neutral cleaner for the polished-concrete floors, rather than a generic spray-and-wipe set.

Can you free a Crittall window hinge a previous tenant painted shut?

Yes. We hand-work the hinge knuckles with a heated joint softener where an old tenant has painted them shut, and lift bead-line paint with a fine plastic spudger rather than a blade, so the steel and the surrounding paint line are not damaged. The Crittall hand-pass is included on the loft cohort at no extra charge.

What about the polished-concrete floor seal marks?

The concrete on the 2000s loft cohort was sealed with a penetrating sealer, and a heavy desk or wardrobe leg leaves a ring after a year or two in one position. We hand-buff it with a pH-neutral cleaner. Alkaline kitchen sprays etch the seal and make the mark permanent, so lift heavy furniture the day before if you can, and let us do the pass. It is included on every loft.

Do you handle HMO common parts under Islington’s licensing?

We do. Common parts, the stairs, hallway, shared kitchen and shared bathroom, are priced as standard rooms. Islington’s borough-wide additional HMO licensing started on 1 February 2026 and covers three-to-four-sharer HMOs everywhere in Clerkenwell ward, so the shared spaces get walked as separate items. The cleaning standard at hand-back is the same whether a licence sits behind the door or not.

Is my Exmouth Market flat under selective licensing?

Probably not. Islington’s live selective scheme covers only Finsbury Park, Tollington and Hillrise wards. Clerkenwell was named in a 2025 consultation, but the wards approved in October 2025 did not include it and have no confirmed start date, so a one-household let around Exmouth Market is generally outside selective licensing right now. An HMO share is a different matter and will usually need an additional licence.

What about scale on the chrome shower fittings?

EC1R is on Thames Water and the supply is hard, around 293 parts per million of calcium carbonate, which is in the very-hard band. Chrome shower heads, screen runners, mixer taps and kettle elements need a dilute descaler with proper dwell time and then a polish. A generic kitchen spray will not lift set scale, which is why hard-water inventory fails on this point so often.

Are you insured, and who are you?

Yes. Public liability cover is in place, and we are Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, trading since 2014. The certificate is available on request, and the Clerkenwell managing agents usually want to see it on a first booking with a new firm.

Do you work on the shop-with-flat-above stock on the market itself?

Yes. The parade flats reached by a side door and dog-leg stair are on our regular round. The second-turn runner edges and the upper-window reveals, where vapour from the restaurant kitchens below collects, are the clerk’s standard tests, and we know where they look first.

How quickly can you book me in?

Usually 48 to 72 hours’ notice across EC1R. Same-day is sometimes possible if a team is finishing nearby on Rosoman Street or Skinner Street. Friday move-outs and end of month fill earliest, so ring ahead for those. If it is short notice, ring anyway and we will do what we can.

What if my landlord disputes the clean?

If we have done the work to checklist standard and the photo pack confirms it, the dispute usually resolves before it reaches a scheme adjudicator. If it escalates, Shelter’s deposit guide walks through the route, and we send the dated photo pack as evidence at no extra charge.