The streets where petrol got its name
The word petrol was coined in Hackney Wick. In the 1890s an oil distiller on the Wick, Carless, Capel and Leonard, needed a name for the light fuel it was refining, and the brand it settled on stuck to the whole product. A few decades earlier, on the same patch of ground by the River Lea, Alexander Parkes had made parkesine, the first man-made plastic, between 1866 and 1868. This was a place that made things for a hundred years, and the flat you are now handing the keys to was almost certainly part of that, before it was a flat at all.
That history is the reason this page reads differently from the rest of E9. Hackney Wick had little rental market until the industry left and the buildings stayed. Print works, joinery shops, food factories and oil yards emptied out, the rents were cheap, and from the 1990s artists moved into the empty floors. By 2013 there were more than six hundred artist studios crammed into the old sheds. Then the 2012 Olympics landed next door, the regeneration money arrived, and the same warehouses started turning into flats.
So the housing here is young, even where the brick is old. A warehouse conversion off Wallis Road might be a hundred and twenty years old as a building and five years old as a home. The new blocks by the park are newer still. And the people renting them turn over fast: this is a place of one- and two-year lets, freelancers, people in the creative trades, young professionals priced out of Hackney Central, with a steady churn of move-outs every month.
We have cleaned end-of-tenancy flats across E9 for over a decade. Hackney Wick has its own pattern, and this page is built around it.
The short version is plain. Clean the flat to the inventory, not to the eye, and the deposit comes back. Most people clean to the eye.
Where Hackney Wick stops and Fish Island begins
Stand on the bridge over the Hertford Union Canal and you can put one foot in each borough. Hackney Wick proper sits north of that canal, in the elbow where the A12 bends, and it is in the London Borough of Hackney, postcode E9. Cross the water to the south and you are on Fish Island, which is Tower Hamlets and postcode E3, even though it looks and feels like the same place and people use the name Hackney Wick for both. The estate agents blur it. The councils do not.
This matters more than it sounds, and it is the one thing a check-out here can hinge on. The two boroughs run different licensing, charge different fees and inspect to their own paperwork, so two near-identical warehouse flats two hundred metres apart can have different rules attached. I will come back to what each side needs further down, because it is the part tenants most often get wrong.
Fish Island is a small thing, a triangle of about fifty acres with water on two sides, the Hertford Union Canal along the top and the River Lea down its length. It carries the same warehouse-and-new-build mix as the Hackney side, the same creative businesses, the same Fish Island Village conversions. The 2018 Creative Enterprise Zone deliberately treated the two together, a joint Hackney and Tower Hamlets scheme. For everything except the council you deal with, it is one neighbourhood.
The river and the canals are not scenery here, they are the street plan. The Lee Navigation, the Hertford Union and the old cuts wrap the district, the towpaths are how a lot of people get about, and several of the flats we clean look straight onto the water. Lovely to live in, a nuisance to load a carpet machine into.
Stand on the bridge over the Hertford Union Canal and you can put one foot in each borough.
Three kinds of flat by the Lea
An inventory clerk grades a flat on its own fabric, so the kind of building you are leaving decides what gets looked at hardest. In Hackney Wick the stock falls into three rough types, and they fail in three different ways.
The first is the warehouse conversion. This is what the area is known for, the old industrial floors around Queen’s Yard, Wallis Road and the streets off White Post Lane turned into flats. Queen’s Yard alone runs from a Victorian warehouse to a row of 1960s factory sheds, and it now holds CRATE Brewery and the seaweed-packaging firm Notpla as much as homes. A converted unit has steel-framed or huge single-glazed windows, exposed brick, visible ductwork, and concrete or salvaged-timber floors. It has high ceilings and odd ledges, which means dust collects where nobody can reach and a clerk with a torch always can. There is simply more surface per square metre than in an ordinary flat.
The second is the new-build. The Olympic Park regeneration brought a wall of new apartment blocks, co-living buildings and build-to-rent towers, with more completing now: Wickside is finishing its flats this year, and Hackney Yards at E9 5HA is delivering a run of shared-ownership homes. A new flat is plainer to clean than a warehouse, but it fails on different things. The grout is pale and shows everything, the appliances are integrated and need pulling, the balcony doors and tracks gather grime, and the white walls mark. Clerks on the new blocks are strict precisely because the flat started spotless.
The third is the older stock, the terraces and bits of post-war housing on the edges where the Wick shades into Homerton and Old Ford. These clean the way Victorian and council flats clean everywhere, with sash tracks or sealed units, tougher kitchens and more wear. We work all three, and the price follows the size and fabric of the flat, not the postcode on the door.
There is one more thing the warehouse stock carries that nothing else in E9 does. Many of these were, and some still are, live/work units, where the lease covers a working studio as well as a home. A potter, a furniture maker or a screen printer leaves a particular residue, fine dust, glaze splatter, ink, paint on a concrete floor, and a check-out on a live/work unit is graded on the work area too. We clean those spaces to the same inventory standard as the living quarters, because the agent inspects both, and a year of studio use does not wipe off with a household spray.
Where an E9 deposit actually leaks
Deductions almost never come from the places people clean. The middle of the floor gets done and the worktops get wiped. The money goes on the surfaces nobody thinks about until a clerk shines a torch on them, and in a Hackney Wick flat the list has a few local twists.
The oven leads it, the same as everywhere. Most flats here let furnished, so the cooker came with the tenancy and has often not had a real clean in a year. Burnt-on grease on the door glass, racks gone brown, the grill pan, the rings: every one is gradeable. The extractor hood traps a film of grease that yellows the metal, and the filter behind the grille is regularly the single dirtiest item in the flat.
Then come the windows, and this is where the warehouse stock bites. Steel and aluminium frames show every mark and smear, and the deep reveals and high transoms collect dust and dead flies that a tenant never reaches. Single-glazed industrial windows sweat, so the sills and bottom rails grow mould. A clerk photographs all of it because it photographs well.
Limescale is next. The water here is hard. An older basin or chrome taps fur up round the spout and the plughole within months, and limescale always shows in a photo. We acid-treat the affected metal and ceramic, then buff it, so the chrome comes back rather than staying cloudy in the report.
After that it is the quiet list, longer in a converted flat than almost anywhere. Dust on the exposed ductwork and the tops of tall units. Skirting behind where the bed and the sofa stood. The seal round the shower tray, where pink mould grows back in a week. Inside every kitchen cupboard, emptied and wiped. Behind the toilet. The bin recess. On a concrete floor, the ground-in marks a domestic mop just spreads around. None of these are difficult on their own. Get one wrong, though, and the agent has grounds to hold part of the deposit, which is the gap our 48-hour re-clean guarantee closes: if the clerk or the agent challenges anything we cleaned, we come back inside three days and put it right at no charge, usually before a dispute is even opened.
The licence depends on which side of the canal
Here is the boundary point made concrete, because it changes the move-out maths and almost nobody gets it right first time. Which licence your flat needs depends on whether it sits in Hackney or in Tower Hamlets, and the line between them is that canal.
On the Hackney side, the rules tightened this year. Hackney Council approved a selective licensing scheme on 24 November 2025, and it comes into force on 1 May 2026 and runs to 30 April 2031. Hackney Wick is one of the seventeen wards named in it. In a selective ward a privately rented home let to a single household, a single tenant or two people sharing needs a council licence, full stop, regardless of how many people live there. If your flat is north of the Hertford Union Canal, the odds it now falls under selective licensing are very high, and you can check a specific address on Hackney’s property licensing pages.
Hackney also runs additional HMO licensing from the same date, which catches the smaller shares, the flats let to three or four people from two or more households that fall below the national mandatory threshold. A mandatory HMO licence has long been needed for a house of five or more tenants from two or more households sharing facilities, and the additional scheme reaches down to the three- and four-person shares. A warehouse flat split between a few people is often exactly that.
Cross the canal to Fish Island, and the picture changes. Tower Hamlets does not run a selective scheme on the Bow East ward that covers Fish Island, so an ordinary single-household let there does not need a selective licence the way the Hackney side does. What Tower Hamlets does have is borough-wide additional HMO licensing, in force since 2024, which covers any flat shared by three or more people from two or more households. So a sharer on Fish Island needs a licence and a sole tenant next door may not, while two hundred metres north in Hackney both would. Same-looking flats, different councils, different answers.
Why would a cleaning firm track any of this? Because licensing drags inventories with it. Where a property is licensed the council expects it kept to a standard, the check-in is logged in more detail, and the check-out bar rises to match. Good-looking flats fail a strict check-out that they would have passed on a casual one.
What a Hackney Wick inventory clerk checks
A check-out is a walk-round against the inventory taken when you moved in. The clerk works room by room, photographs everything, and grades each item against its move-in condition. In a furnished flat that is a long list, because more of what is in the room belongs to the landlord.
In the kitchen they open the oven, lift the hob rings and pull out the grill. They look behind and under the appliances if those move, open every cupboard and drawer, and run a finger along the top of the units. Splashback, grout, the sink, the taps, the plughole and the bin recess all get checked. In a converted flat they will also note the big window over the worktop, where steam and grease meet and nobody cleans.
In the bathroom they check the bath or shower tray, the seals, the grout, the taps and showerhead for limescale, the toilet inside and behind, the extractor grille, the mirror, and the floor where it meets the skirting. Hard-water marks on chrome get written up because they show in a photo. Mould round a shower seal does too.
In the living rooms and bedrooms it is floors, skirting, window glass and frames, sills, radiators front and back, light fittings, switches and sockets, and the insides of any fitted wardrobes. They move what moves and look behind it. In a warehouse flat the tall steel windows, the exposed brick and the high ledges alone take a clerk several minutes a room, and on a new-build the balcony doors and grout get the same hard look.
We clean to exactly that walk. Our teams work a 57-point checklist that the agents themselves recognise, and the supervisor ticks off the same items the clerk will check, in much the same order, before the clerk ever arrives. That is the whole reason we hold a 97% first-time pass rate on these flats. We built the list around what gets flagged, not around what looks tidy for a viewing.
The agent relationship helps in a way tenants do not always see. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, a good number of them the firms working Hackney Wick and Fish Island, so we already know how a given agency’s clerks tend to mark. Some are fussy about oven door glass, some about limescale, some about the window frames a warehouse flat is covered in. Knowing the agent before we arrive means the team cleans for that clerk’s habits, one more reason the flat passes first time. Over the years that approach has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
It also means we are straight about what is wear and tear rather than dirt. A faded floorboard or a sash cord gone slack is age, not a cleaning failure, and the deposit schemes know the difference. If you do end up arguing a deduction, the scheme runs a free dispute service that weighs the evidence on both sides, and a clean flat plus a clear inventory is most of your case.
The jobs a warehouse flat tends to need
The end-of-tenancy clean covers the whole flat, top to bottom. Some jobs sit outside it because they need different kit, and on a Hackney Wick let they come up more than most. We tell you on the quote which ones your flat actually needs, rather than pushing the lot.
Floors are the local one. So many flats here have polished concrete, resin or reclaimed timber instead of carpet, and those go past a mop’s reach into needing a proper treatment, especially in a live/work unit with paint or glaze ground in. Our floor cleaning covers the hard floors a standard clean cannot rescue. Where there is carpet, usually in the bedrooms of a converted or new-build flat, our carpet cleaning uses hot water extraction to lift the ground-in dirt the inventory photo would otherwise catch.
The oven is the other one people bolt on. A proper oven clean means taking out the racks and removable parts, cleaning them away from the oven, then doing the interior and the door glass so the burnt-on grease is gone rather than smeared. In a furnished let where the cooker came with the flat, this is the single job most likely to save the deposit.
Then the windows, which in this housing stock are a job in themselves. The big single-glazed industrial panes and the high warehouse transoms are hard to reach and show every streak, so our window cleaning team do the outsides with water-fed poles where a check-out can still note them. Upholstery is worth a thought when the sofa and the mattresses came with the tenancy, which in a furnished flat they usually did; our upholstery cleaning pulls the dust and grime out of the fabric so each piece matches its move-in state.
Two more, while everyone is moving at once. If you want help shifting boxes down from a fourth-floor warehouse flat with a slow goods lift, or none, we run a removals service. If you are staying put and simply want the place brought back rather than handed back, our domestic cleaning covers regular upkeep instead, and a heavier one-off is a deep clean, which is a different job again, covered just below.
What it costs, and booking around the A12
We do not charge by the hour. An hourly clean gives the cleaner a reason to slow down and gives you a bill you cannot predict. We price the whole flat as a fixed job, based on its size, and the team stays until every room is done to the checklist.
Size means bedrooms and bathrooms, roughly. A studio conversion off White Post Lane is a smaller job than a three-bed live/work unit or a new-build family flat by the park, and the quote reflects that. Tell us the postcode, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether you want the floors, carpets or oven adding, and we give you one number. That number does not move on the day unless the flat turns out very different from what you described, which is rare. You can get a feel for where prices sit on our prices page before you ring.
What you do not pay for: detergents, equipment, or a weekend surcharge. The team brings everything, and the Saturday or Sunday price is the same as the Tuesday price, which matters because tenancy end dates rarely fall to suit anyone.
What the flat needs from you is simple. Electricity on, hot water running, and the fridge and freezer defrosted before we arrive, because a frozen-solid freezer cannot be cleaned. Clear your belongings out first too, so the team can reach the skirting, the cupboards, the window frames and the space behind the furniture.
Set against the cost, the maths is straightforward. With the average private rent in Hackney around £2,598 a month on the latest official figures, the deposit on a Hackney Wick flat is several thousand pounds tied up in the scheme, so a fixed-price clean that gets it back is cheap insurance. Our end of tenancy service exists for exactly this handover.
Getting to you is usually easier than getting parked. Hackney Wick station, rebuilt between 2017 and 2018 into the brutalist concrete box you see now, sits on the Mildmay line of the London Overground and runs straight to Stratford one way and across the top of the city the other, so a team can reach a flat near the station without a van having to find a space. The rebuild even put in a subway under the tracks that doubles as the walking and cycling link between the Hackney and Tower Hamlets sides.
Parking is the grumble, and a real one. The A12 and the East Cross Route wall the district in on two sides, the streets around Queen’s Yard and Wallis Road are narrow and mostly controlled, and several flats sit on towpaths a van cannot get near. We plan the kit-heavy jobs around that, and we will tell you straight if a street means the team arrives on foot with the gear. It rarely affects you. We give an arrival window, the team turns up inside it, and the clean takes as long as the flat takes.
Booking is a phone call. Tell us the date your tenancy ends, the postcode and the size of the flat, and we will hold the slot. You can also reach us through the contact page if a call is awkward.
If you are moving within the area, it helps to know the neighbours. Straight across the canal on Fish Island the work is the same, and we cover the Tower Hamlets side from Old Ford down to Bow. We also work over toward Victoria Park, across the park at Stratford, up the road in Homerton and Hackney Central, out at Leyton, and along the river by Hackney Marshes. It is all part of the wider Hackney end of tenancy patch we work daily.
End of tenancy against a deep or regular clean
People mix these up, and booking the wrong one wastes money. They are different jobs with different aims.
A regular clean keeps a lived-in flat ticking over week to week. A deep clean is a heavier one-off, good for spring or after building work, that gets into the parts a weekly clean skips. An end-of-tenancy clean is neither. It is a clean aimed at a specific document, the inventory, with the goal of returning the flat to its move-in condition so the deposit comes back. It covers the whole flat, empty, to a let standard, and it is graded against a report rather than against how you like your home kept.
The glossary below sorts the terms that come up most when tenants ring us, because half the confusion is just vocabulary.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- A full, top-to-bottom clean of an empty flat, priced per property, aimed at matching the move-in inventory so the deposit is returned. Backed here by our 48-hour re-clean guarantee.
- Check-out inventory
- The clerk’s report at the end of a tenancy, comparing the flat photo by photo against the check-in condition. The document your clean is judged against.
- Deposit protection scheme
- The government-approved scheme holding your deposit. A landlord must protect it within 30 days, and there are three approved schemes covering England and Wales.
- Selective licensing
- A council licence required for most single-household private lets in named wards, including Hackney Wick, in force across Hackney from 1 May 2026. Fish Island, in Tower Hamlets, is not in a selective scheme.
- Additional HMO licensing
- A licence for smaller shared homes let to three or four people from two or more households, run by both Hackney and Tower Hamlets, below the national mandatory HMO threshold.
- Live/work unit
- A flat whose lease covers a working studio as well as a home, common in the Wick’s warehouse conversions. The work area is inspected at check-out too.
One more thing worth saying plainly. The law around renting changed with the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which reshapes how tenancies start and end, but the deposit basics still hold. Leave the flat clean to the inventory and the deposit comes back. That part has not changed, and it is the one bit of moving out you can fully control.
Questions Hackney Wick tenants ask
Do I need a licence for my Hackney Wick flat, and does it matter which side of the canal I am on?
It very likely does. Hackney Wick is one of seventeen wards named in Hackney’s selective licensing scheme, which runs from 1 May 2026 to 30 April 2031, so a flat north of the Hertford Union Canal let to a single household, one tenant or two people sharing needs a council licence. Across the canal on Fish Island you are in Tower Hamlets, where there is no selective scheme on that ward, but borough-wide additional HMO licensing covers shared flats of three or more people. Different council, different rule, same canal. Confirm the address with your agent before you hand back the keys.
How is cleaning a warehouse conversion different from a normal flat?
A warehouse conversion has more surfaces, and harder ones. Steel or aluminium window frames show every smear, exposed brick and ductwork gather dust on ledges a normal flat does not have, and a concrete or reclaimed-timber floor needs the right treatment rather than a mop and a hope. The ceilings are high, so the clerk’s torch reaches places nobody has touched in a year. We clean the volume of the room, not just the bits at standing height, which is why these flats fail a casual clean and pass a proper one.
Can you clean while I am at work or out of the country?
Yes, and a lot of Hackney Wick tenants book it that way, because the creative and freelance crowd here are often travelling when the tenancy ends. We can take keys from your agent or a neighbour, clean the empty flat, and leave it ready for the check-out. We work seven days a week at the same price, so a tenancy that ends on a Sunday is no problem, and we give a firm arrival window rather than a vague morning slot.
What does the clean cost, and is it priced by the hour?
It is a fixed price for the whole flat, never by the hour, based on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Tell us the postcode and the size of the flat and we give you one number that does not change on the day. There is no weekend surcharge, so a Saturday or Sunday checkout costs the same as a midweek one, and detergents and equipment are included. You can see roughly where prices sit on our prices page.
What happens if the inventory clerk fails the clean?
We come back. Our 48-hour re-clean guarantee means that if the clerk or the agent flags anything we cleaned, we return within three days and put it right at no charge. Because our teams work a 57-point agent-approved checklist, that rarely happens, which is how we hold a 97% first-time pass rate, but the guarantee is there so a single missed item never costs you the deposit.
Do you cover the new-build blocks around the Olympic Park as well as the old warehouses?
Yes. We clean the new apartment blocks going up around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and at Wickside, the warehouse conversions in and around Queen’s Yard, the co-living buildings, and the older terraces, and we cover Fish Island across the canal too. The new blocks tend to fail on grout, appliance interiors and balcony doors rather than on age, so the method changes with the building, but the fixed-price, whole-flat approach is the same.
Do I need to be there, and what does the flat need ready?
You do not have to be present. The flat needs electricity on, hot water running, and the fridge and freezer defrosted, since a frozen freezer cannot be cleaned and one mid-defrost soaks everything below it. Clear your belongings out first so the team can reach skirting, cupboards, window frames and the spaces behind furniture, and the clean covers everything else top to bottom.
How do you get the gear in when parking by the canal is so tight?
Carefully, and with a plan. The streets around Queen’s Yard and Wallis Road are narrow, a lot of it is controlled parking, and the A12 hems the whole area in on two sides, so we sort access before the day. Hackney Wick station is a short walk from most flats, the team can carry kit in from there, and we will tell you straight if a building means we arrive on foot from the road. It rarely affects the price or the result.