Where our Harringay rounds actually are
Most of our Harringay work sits on the Ladder, the grid of parallel streets running west off Green Lanes towards Wightman Road. There are twenty of those rungs, give or take, and the houses on them are late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces, the bulk of them long since split into two or three flats. That single fact shapes nearly every end of tenancy clean we do here. A converted upper flat with the original cornicing, a tiled hallway shared with the downstairs tenant, and a kitchen wedged into what used to be a back bedroom is a different job from a purpose-built flat, and the inventory clerk knows it.
Here is the short version for anyone in a hurry. We are a London domestic-cleaning firm, working since 2014, and an end of tenancy clean in Harringay starts at £156 for a studio and £207 for a one-bed flat, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee written into the booking. Phone 0333 555 2076 for a quote. The rest of this page is the detail that actually matters when you are trying to get your deposit back off a Ladder flat or a place near Harringay Green Lanes station.
The Ladder, and why its flats trip an inventory check
The Ladder streets were named, mostly, after military and naval men and the odd writer, so you get Hampden Road, Allison Road, Pemberton and the rest sitting in neat parallel lines between the two long roads. It is a tidy bit of map and a fiddly bit of cleaning. The terraces went up around 1900, and the period detail that estate agents love is the same detail that costs tenants their deposit at the end.
Picture rails. Deep skirting. Ceiling roses and coving that nobody has reached with a duster in two years. Sash windows in the front rooms, with the cords and the runners and the painted-over catches that collect grime in a way modern windows do not. When a check-out clerk runs a hand along the top of a door frame in a Ladder flat, there is usually something there, and that something is what the deduction is about.
Then there are the conversions themselves. Splitting a three-storey terrace into flats leaves odd corners: a bathroom carved out under the stairs, a galley kitchen where a chimney breast still juts into the room, an alcove either side of a sealed fireplace. We clean a lot of those alcoves. They gather dust on the ledges and cobwebs in the high corners, and a tired tenant doing a self-clean almost always misses them because you do not look up when you are knackered.
When a check-out clerk runs a hand along the top of a door frame in a Ladder flat, there is usually something there, and that something is what the deduction is about.
Sharers make it harder again. A fair number of Ladder flats are let to three or four people on a joint tenancy, often a couple of working tenants and a postgrad or two, and that means three or four people’s worth of kitchen residue and bathroom limescale building up over a year with nobody quite owning the deep clean. When everyone moves out on the same Saturday, the place needs more than a wipe-down. We have done plenty of those four-sharer flats off Wightman Road, and the oven alone can take an hour and a half.
None of this is exotic. It is just specific. We have cleaned enough N4 and N8 conversions to know where a Ladder flat hides its dirt, and our checklist is built around exactly those spots rather than a generic room list.
Green Lanes grease is a job of its own
If you have lived on the Ladder, you have eaten off Green Lanes. The stretch from the Salisbury down past Grand Parade is one of the best runs of Turkish, Kurdish and Cypriot food in London, all charcoal ocakbasi grills and bakeries and greengrocers with the fruit stacked out on the pavement. Gokyuzu, Antepliler, the late-night grill houses where the mangal smoke hangs in the doorway. People call it the mangal mile and they are not wrong.
That food is brilliant. It is also, from a cleaning point of view, a particular kind of problem. Tenants here cook. Lamb on a griddle, frying, char, the works, and a year of that leaves a film of cooking fat across the kitchen that you cannot always see until the light hits it. It settles on top of the wall units, on the tiles behind the hob, on the extractor hood and its filter, and inside the oven it bakes onto the glass in layers. Letting-agent kitchens get marked down for this more than anything else in Harringay.
We use a strong degreaser on the kitchen and we soak the oven parts properly rather than scrubbing dry. The racks, the inner glass, the fan cover, the trays all come out and go into a heated dip tank so the baked-on carbon lifts instead of smearing. Limescale on the taps and the splashback gets its own treatment, because the water up here is hard and the scale builds fast around a kitchen sink that has had a year of pasta water tipped down it.
The hard water makes all of it worse. North London water is hard, and in a kitchen that scale builds around the tap base, on the kettle, in the splashback grout and across the sink. Pair that with cooking fat and you get a surface that two passes of supermarket spray will not touch. We descale first, then degrease, then finish, in that order, because doing it the other way round just moves the muck around.
One honest note. We are good, but we are not magic. If a hob has a cracked enamel ring or the oven seal has perished, that is wear, not dirt, and no clean fixes it. What we can promise is that the grease comes off and the kitchen reads as clean to whoever does your check-out.
What Haringey’s licensing rules mean for your check-out
Harringay sits inside two of Haringey council’s licensing schemes, and that matters more than most tenants realise. Since 17 November 2022, the Harringay ward has been part of the council’s selective licensing scheme, which means most privately rented homes in the area need a licence, the scheme runs for five years, and West Green and St Ann’s next door are covered too (see Haringey’s selective licensing page). On top of that, from 17 June 2024 the whole borough came under an additional HMO licensing scheme that runs to 16 June 2029, which catches a lot of the shared Ladder conversions.
Why should a tenant care about a landlord’s licence at the end of a tenancy? Because a licensed property is one the council can inspect against a set of conditions, and a landlord operating inside these schemes tends to keep the inventory and the check-out tighter. The condition standards sit under Part 2 of the Housing Act 2004 (the HMO licensing provisions), and a managing agent who is staying compliant will often expect the place handed back at the same standard it was let. That is not the same as demanding professional cleaning, and the distinction is worth knowing.
Shelter is clear on the point: you only have to return a property as clean as it was when you moved in, and the check-in inventory is the benchmark, not the agent’s mood on the day (Shelter sets out what a landlord can deduct). A blanket clause forcing you to pay for professional cleaning is not enforceable. But here is the rub: if the flat was professionally cleaned before you moved in, which the conversions on the Ladder usually are between tenancies, then matching that standard means a proper clean, and doing it yourself after a year of grilling lamb and sharing a bathroom is a tall order.
The rules around all this have shifted recently too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 (the 2025 Act) changes how tenancies end and how disputes run, and deposit protection itself is still handled through the three government schemes set out on the deposit-protection guidance (gov.uk explains how deposit protection works). If your money is held in one of those schemes and a cleaning deduction is unfair, you can dispute it for free. A good end of tenancy clean, with evidence, is what keeps you out of that dispute in the first place.
Why tenants here lose on the self-clean
Almost everyone tries to do it themselves first. That is fair enough, a bank holiday weekend and a few bottles of spray seem like they should cover it, and for a tidy modern flat they often do. The trouble in Harringay is the housing stock again. A Ladder conversion gives you more surface, more awkward height and more period detail to get wrong, and the result is a flat that looks clean to a tired tenant and reads as dirty to a clerk with a torch.
The misses are always the same handful of things. The top of the kitchen wall units, where grease and dust set into a sticky grey film nobody can see from the floor. The oven door glass, scrubbed on the outside and ignored between the panes. Limescale on the shower screen and around the bath taps, because hard-water scale needs a descaler and a bit of dwell time, not a quick wipe. The window runners and sash channels in the front rooms. The skirting behind where the sofa sat. Extractor fan grilles in both the kitchen and the bathroom, furred up with a year of use.
Then there is the equipment problem. A domestic vacuum and a sponge will not lift ground-in carpet soiling or shift baked oven carbon, and hiring a carpet machine for the day plus buying the chemicals often costs more than booking the extra with us. People underestimate the time, too. A genuine end of tenancy clean on a three-sharer flat is most of a day for two trained cleaners with proper kit; doing it solo after a week of packing is how the bathroom ends up half done and the deduction lands anyway.
We are not saying never do it yourself. Plenty of tenants in smaller studios clean their own place well and pass. We are saying that the gap between a domestic clean and an inventory-standard clean is exactly the gap a clerk is paid to find, and in a Ladder flat that gap is wider than people expect.
What a deposit-back clean covers, room by room
Our end of tenancy clean works off a 57-point agent-approved checklist, and it is the same list whether you are in a studio off St Ann’s Road or a four-bed house near Ducketts Common. The point of a fixed list is that nothing gets argued about afterwards. Here is roughly how it breaks down by room.
In the kitchen we do the oven inside and out, the hob and extractor, the inside and outside of every cupboard, the worktops, the splashback tiles, the sink and taps descaled, and behind and on top of the appliances we can safely move. The fridge and freezer get cleaned out once you have defrosted them. Bins wiped, skirting done, floor washed last.
The bathroom is the other room that decides a deposit. We descale the shower screen, the taps, the head and the tiles, scrub the grout, clean the toilet properly including the base and the cistern, wipe the extractor fan, polish the mirror and the chrome, and get the floor and the skirting. Hard water leaves a chalky bloom on glass and chrome around here, so descaling is most of the work.
Living rooms and bedrooms are about the things people forget. Light fittings and lampshades, switches and sockets, skirting boards, door tops and frames, picture rails where the flat has them, inside the windows, the sills and the reachable frames, radiators, and the full floor whether it is boards or carpet. Cobwebs out of the high corners and the coving. Wardrobes and fitted cupboards wiped inside. We dust top-down so nothing settles back on a surface we have already done.
The shared hallway is the bit that catches people in a conversion. If you have the ground-floor flat, the entrance hall, the original floor tiles and the stairs up to the next flat are often part of your demise on the inventory, and that communal-feeling space is exactly where nobody cleans during a tenancy. We check the inventory with you so we clean what is actually yours, not the whole house, and not less than your share either. Getting that line right has saved more than one tenant a deduction for a hallway they assumed was someone else’s job.
Some things sit outside the standard clean and we will always say so up front. Carpet shampooing, external windows above the ground floor, walls that need more than a spot-wipe, and a garden or yard are add-ons, not part of the base price. We would rather quote them honestly than surprise you.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken when you moved in, recording the flat’s condition and cleanliness. It is the standard your check-out is measured against, so it is worth digging out before you move.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme requiring most private rentals in named wards to hold a licence. Harringay ward has been covered since 17 November 2022.
- Additional HMO licensing
- A separate scheme for houses and flats in multiple occupation. Haringey made it borough-wide from 17 June 2024, which catches many shared Ladder conversions.
- 48-hour re-clean guarantee
- If the inventory clerk or agent flags our work, we come back and put it right free within 48 hours of the report.
What it costs in Harringay
Prices are fixed by the size of the property, not invented on the doorstep, and they are the full price rather than a teaser rate that climbs once we are inside. A studio is £156. A one-bed flat is £207, which covers a good share of the Ladder conversions. A two-bed is £243. A three-bed is £339, and a four-bed, which is the larger terraced houses and the bigger shares near Wightman Road, is £425.
If your place does not fit a tidy band, or you only need part of it done, we also work by the hour at £30 per cleaner. That suits a tenant who has already done the bedrooms and just wants the kitchen and bathroom brought up to standard, or a small studio that needs less than a full booking.
The headline numbers people quote at each other on the local forums tend to leave out the extras, so here they are plainly. Carpet cleaning is £36 a bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 to do a whole two-bed flat. Oven cleaning, if you book it on its own rather than as part of the end of tenancy job, is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. Those are the same prices we charge across London; Harringay is not marked up.
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and a chunk of those manage property across N4 and N8, which is partly why our checklist lines up with what local clerks look for. Over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have disappeared into cleaning deductions. That is the whole point of paying for the clean: it costs less than the deduction it prevents, most of the time.
You get the price before we start. No hourly creep on a fixed-price booking, no extras bolted on at the end without a word.
Booking, timing, and the Wightman Road parking problem
Booking is straightforward. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the flat’s size, the postcode and the date you need it done, and we give you a fixed quote and a slot. We work seven days a week, which matters in Harringay because so many tenancies end on a Friday or a Saturday and everyone wants the same checkout-day clean.
Timing the clean around your check-out is the part people get wrong. Book the clean for after the van has gone and the flat is empty, because we cannot do skirting and floors around a pile of boxes, and ideally leave the check-out appointment for the day after we have been. Defrost the fridge and freezer the night before, or it is an ice job rather than a clean. Have the electricity and water on, since neither of us can do much in a cold dark flat.
Now, parking. Wightman Road is the spine of the Ladder and it is a genuine rat-run, with traffic counts that have run well over a hundred thousand vehicles a week, so it is not a road you leave a van sitting on lightly. Most of the Ladder rungs are in a controlled parking zone, and a working van needs either a bay or a visitor permit for the window we are there. Tell us the parking situation when you book. If you can sort a permit or a suspended bay, brilliant; if not, we will work out the nearest sensible spot, because hunting for parking eats into the time we should be spending on your oven.
One more local quirk. The two stations confuse people. Harringay Green Lanes is on the Suffragette line, the Overground that runs Gospel Oak to Barking Riverside and only got that name in late 2024, while plain Harringay station, a few minutes away, is on the Great Northern route into Moorgate and King’s Cross and the Hertford loop. If you are telling us which one your flat is near, the names are nearly identical and the lines are completely different, so the postcode is safer.
Where we leave the van depends on which end of the area you are in. For the southern rungs and anything near Finsbury Park, which forms the south-western edge of Harringay, there is more chance of a usable bay off the main road. Up towards Ducketts Common and Turnpike Lane station it is tighter, and around the Arena Shopping Park end on Williamson Road we can usually pull in without much fuss. We have learned the kerbs over the years, so if you are not sure, describe the street and we will tell you what to expect.
Carpets, ovens, and the extras worth adding
The base clean handles surfaces. A few things in a Harringay flat usually want more than that, and they are the things that turn a borderline check-out into a clear pass.
Carpets first. A lot of the Ladder flats still have carpet in the bedrooms and on the stairs of the conversion, and a year of foot traffic from Green Lanes, plus the muck off the New River Path that runs right along Wightman Road, gets walked in and ground down. The New River walk is lovely and it is also a reliable source of mud in autumn, and Railway Fields, the little local nature reserve off Green Lanes that used to be a railway goods yard, adds its own share if you walk the dog there. A hot-water extraction clean lifts what a vacuum cannot. We charge £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, and £115 for a whole two-bed, and if the inventory noted the carpets as professionally cleaned at the start, matching that is often the difference between getting the full deposit and an argument.
Ovens are the other one. We include the oven in the end of tenancy clean, but if you are not booking a full clean, a standalone oven job is £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a range. Given how much lamb and char comes off Green Lanes into Harringay kitchens, the oven is where a lot of the visible grime lives, and it is the first thing a clerk opens.
Upholstery and mattress cleaning are worth a thought if you are leaving furniture behind, and external windows above the ground floor we reach with water-fed poles, which is the only safe way to do the upper sashes on a three-storey terrace. We can also fold in our wider deep cleaning service if a flat has been let go for longer than a year, and pair the clean with our removals team if you would rather hand the whole move to one firm. For day-to-day upkeep before you ever reach a check-out, our regular domestic cleaning covers the same ground on a lighter touch.
If you are not sure what your flat needs, say so when you ring. We have cleaned enough places between Green Lanes and Wightman Road to tell you honestly whether the carpets are worth doing or whether the base clean will carry it.
Questions Harringay tenants ask us
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Harringay?
It is fixed by size: £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. That is the full price, with no extras added once we are inside. Carpets and standalone oven cleans are priced separately.
Do you cover the Harringay Ladder and the streets off Green Lanes?
Yes. The Ladder, between Green Lanes and Wightman Road, is where most of our Harringay bookings are, along with the flats near both stations and the houses up towards Ducketts Common. The N4 and N8 postcodes are all standard ground for us.
Will my clean meet what my letting agent checks?
It is built to. We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and many of them manage property across N4 and N8, so the list matches what local clerks inspect against.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or the agent flags anything in our work, we come back and fix it free, as long as you tell us within 48 hours of the check-out report. It is the same 48-hour re-clean guarantee on every booking, studio or house.
Does a professional clean actually get my deposit back?
It is the single most common deduction, so dealing with it properly removes the usual argument. Our first-time pass rate is 97%, and over the years our cleans have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning charges.
Can my landlord force me to pay for professional cleaning?
No, not as a blanket tenancy clause. You only have to return the flat as clean as it was at check-in, measured against the inventory. If the place was professionally cleaned before you moved in, though, matching that standard usually means a proper clean either way.
Does the carpet cleaning cost extra?
Yes, it is a separate add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat. We use hot-water extraction, which lifts ground-in dirt that a vacuum leaves behind. Worth it if the inventory listed the carpets as professionally cleaned at the start.
How long does an end of tenancy clean take in a Ladder flat?
A one-bed conversion is usually a half-day for a small team; a three- or four-bed share runs most of a day. The oven and the bathroom descaling take the longest in this part of Harringay, because of the hard water and the cooking grease.
Do I need to be there while you clean?
No. Plenty of tenants drop keys or leave them with the agent and come back for the check-out. If you are not there, just make sure the flat is empty, the utilities are on and the fridge is defrosted before we arrive.
What about parking your van on the Ladder?
Most rungs are in a controlled parking zone, and Wightman Road is too busy to leave a van on, so a visitor permit or a suspended bay helps. Tell us the parking position when you book and we will sort the nearest workable spot.
Do you clean shared HMO flats with several tenants?
Often. A lot of Harringay conversions are let to three or four sharers, and we clean them as one job at the size-banded price. With several people’s residue built up over a year, the kitchen and bathroom usually need the most attention.
Can you do the clean at short notice on a Friday or Saturday?
Usually, yes. We work seven days a week and we know most Harringay tenancies turn over at the weekend, so we keep slots for checkout-day cleans. Ring early in the week if you can, because the weekend dates go first.
How do I book and what happens next?
Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the flat size, the postcode and your date. We confirm a fixed price and a slot, clean to the checklist on the day, and if anything is flagged we return free within the 48-hour re-clean guarantee.
Which areas near Harringay do you also cover?
Plenty. We clean across the borough hub of Haringey end of tenancy cleaning, and nearby in Turnpike Lane, Wood Green and West Green. If you are moving within North London, the same team and the same prices follow you.