Kennington Park’s end of tenancy cleaning team

Hand back a flat that faces Kennington Park and the inventory clerk goes to the window sill first. The plane trees around the old common shed a fine grit from spring into October, and it settles on the sill lip, the picture-rail run and the tops of the kitchen units where a daily wipe never reaches. That is the check-out that decides your deposit. We are Monster Cleaning, a Lambeth end of tenancy team since 2014, working to a fixed quote or £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee on every job. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SE11 patch around Kennington Park in full, the SE17 edge across Camberwell New Road, and west towards the Oval. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lambeth.

Why the park itself sets the standard

Kennington Park was Kennington Common until the Victorians fenced it, the ground where the Chartists gathered in 1848 before it opened as a public park in 1854. For a tenant moving out, the history matters in one flat, dull way: the park is full of mature planes, the prevailing wind lays their dust on the flats that face it, and the clerk knows exactly where to look. Spring catkin, summer bark grit, autumn leaf mould, and bus soot off the routes down Kennington Park Road all land on the same ledges. The park-facing rooms need the sill run, the cabinet tops and the picture rail done properly, every time.

There is a second thing the park does. The flower gardens and the model lodge draw people in, and the flats along the Park Place and Kennington Park Road fronts sit closest to the railings, so they catch the most of it. On a top-floor conversion the run of dust across the fitted wardrobe tops and the picture rail can be the difference between a pass and a thirty-minute argument at the door. We treat those rooms as the first job of the day, while the light is still coming in flat and the grit shows up against it.

Then there is the water. SE11 sits on the Thames Water supply, and south London runs very hard, around 300ppm calcium carbonate (Thames Water hard water). Scale climbs back onto a shower head, a kettle element or a mixer tap inside a fortnight, and a clerk checks the chrome before almost anything else in a bathroom. The older fittings in the period conversions scale worse than the newer stock on the estates, because the lacquer has long gone, and a generic kitchen spray will not shift it. We carry a proper descaler and give the chrome its dwell time.

So a clean around this park is two jobs at once: the grit the trees leave up high, and the scale the water leaves down low. Get both, document both, and the deposit conversation is short.

A clean around this park is two jobs at once: the grit the trees leave up high, and the scale the water leaves down low.

What Lambeth’s licence put on your flat’s file

Lambeth widened its selective licensing scheme on 1 September 2025, and it runs for five years. Kennington is one of the named wards, and so is Oval next door (Lambeth selective licensing). Only Waterloo, South Bank and Vauxhall sit outside it. The application fee is £923 per property, and on top of that Lambeth runs additional HMO licensing borough-wide for smaller shared houses through to 8 December 2026, plus the mandatory HMO scheme for the larger ones. If you are moving out of a licensed Kennington Park Road conversion or a shared flat off the park, that licence sits on a council file, and the file is what any later dispute gets measured against.

That changes the clean in one practical way. A licensed let gets walked more closely than an unlicensed one used to be, and the shared parts get walked separately: communal stairs, the hallway carpet, the basement steps, the front entrance. Because the licence-holder has to answer to the council for the condition of those areas, a deduction for a scuffed stair or a grubby hall carpet is far more likely to be pressed than it was a couple of years ago. We price HMO common parts as ordinary rooms, so you are not charged twice for the stairwell.

None of this is our price, of course. The rent context around the park has run hot: the ONS put average private rent across Lambeth at about £2,527 in May 2026, the fastest annual rise of any London borough that month (ONS private rent, May 2026). A bigger rent means a bigger deposit, and a bigger deposit means a clerk with a reason to be thorough. The residential deposit cap is still five weeks’ rent for tenancies under £50,000 a year, so a two-bed near the park is often sitting on the far side of £4,000. That is the money on the table at the walk-out.

One tenant who left a share on Kennington Park Place last winter put it plainly:

“Our flat was licensed, so the agent walked the communal stairs and the hall carpet as a separate line, which none of us expected. Monster did the shared parts as part of the job and photographed them, and the landlord could not argue the stairwell was down to us. Deposit split back clean.”
Tomasz, shared 3-bed conversion, Kennington Park Place SE11 4

1 May 2026, and why the move-outs bunched

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every assured shorthold tenancy in England has rolled over to a periodic one, so a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point in the year rather than waiting for a fixed term to run down.

The cleaning side did not move an inch. The deposit is still capped the same way, the check-in report is still the benchmark, and the clean still has to match it. What changed is timing. Around Kennington Park, with its heavy renter churn and its share of political-London tenants near Westminster who leave when the diary says so, the move-outs got more frequent and far less predictable. The dull takeaway pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want at the end of the month goes first.

Where a deduction feels wrong, the deposit scheme is the route. Most SE11 tenancies protect with the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits or the Deposit Protection Service, and free advice on disputed deductions sits with Shelter. A clerk cannot bill you for a fault that was already in the check-in photos, which is why a documented clean settles most arguments before they start.

From the Georgian fronts to the estate decks

The stock around this park changes street by street, and one method does not pass all of it. On a five-minute walk from the park gates you cross Georgian terraces, elegant early-Victorian fronts, big interwar mansion blocks and some of the largest social-housing estates in Lambeth, a legacy the borough has more of than most. The clerk rotates between them in the same week and carries a different list for each.

The period fronts: Kennington Park Road, Cleaver Square, Courtenay Street

These are the conservation streets, the Georgian and early-Victorian terraces broken into flats, a lot of them with twelve-foot front-room ceilings and original cornice. Here the clerk stands on a step and runs a torch along the plaster: cobweb dust caught in the undercut of the moulding is invisible from the floor and pulls a tenant up nearly every time. Original block parquet is the other one, in the grander conversions, where a mop and bucket lifts the wax and leaves a dull stripe down the middle of the room. We do the cornice with a soft head on a pole, never a vacuum brush straight on old lime plaster, and we dry-buff parquet rather than wet it. The listed square stock one street over gets its own treatment on our Cleaver Square end of tenancy page.

The mansion blocks and the interwar flats

The bigger blocks behind the park hold their rent because the floorplans beat anything new-built nearby, and their bathrooms are where the deposit tends to go. The chrome is older, the scale is harder, and the pantry tiling and brass door furniture want care rather than force. A flat like this is quicker per square foot than a listed terrace, because the detail is simpler than original-listed work, but the fittings are less forgiving. The other quirk is access: a lot of these blocks are third and fourth floor with the original stair and no lift, so the move-out itself is slower, and it is worth telling us at the quote so we send enough hands to keep the day on schedule.

The estates and the newer infill: Brixton Road, Hanover Gardens, the Camberwell edge

West and south of the park the postwar and later blocks take over, plus the new-build infill. Here the failure points shift: magnolia scuff at shoulder height on the stairwells, balcony glazing where pollen and pigeon meet, the extractor baffle filter that has not been pulled in eighteen months, and the front sills on the Camberwell New Road side that carry visible bus soot. A damp microfibre clears the soot; a dry duster only pushes it deeper into the frame. The engineered floors in the newer flats take a manufacturer-appropriate cleaner, not the product we would use on old oak.

Different fronts, different faults, same park gates. It is why we ask what you are handing back before we quote, not after.

The 57 things, and where the deposit really goes

Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what SE11 clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job. Here is the shape of it, and the honest truth is that most deductions land in two rooms.

The kitchen, where most of it goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped: racks soaked in a tank, the door glass split so the brown film between the panes comes out, interior, fan, element and seals all done. That film is the single most-flagged oven fault we see. The hob comes apart, the extractor hood and its filter are degreased, and every cupboard is done inside, outside, on top and underneath. In the older kitchens that means pulling the appliances out so the gaps behind and under the fridge, the dishwasher and the washing machine get done and put back, because that grease trap is a line item the clerk knows to check. Fridge and freezer defrosted and washed through, seals scrubbed. The washing-machine drawer comes out and the door gasket gets the grey scale the hard water leaves in it. Sink, taps and waste descaled with the dwell the water needs. Grout brushed, splashback polished, bin washed, floor mopped last once the dust has settled.

The bathroom, the other one

• Scale off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first, with a longer soak on older mansion-block chrome and a rinse twice over
• WC done fully: bowl, rim, hinge, base and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
• Shower screen both sides, the runner track, and the sealant bead
• Mirror, cabinet, shaver socket and the extractor grille wiped
• Grout scrubbed where the shower water hits, photographed first where it is honestly past saving
• Original cast-iron radiators in the period flats done by hand, back, fins and brackets, no spray
• Floor into the corners and behind the loo by hand

Bedrooms, living rooms and the rest

Wardrobes and drawers inside and out. Skirtings, picture rails and dado where they exist. Cornice and ceiling roses on the period fronts by hand. Switches, sockets, thermostat and the doorbell button. Internal doors both sides with the hinges and handles. Carpets vacuumed in two directions and marks spot-treated, with a full shampoo as an add-on. Behind the beds, sofas and freestanding furniture, and the dust-magnet ledges, which on the park side hold the most. Then a last walk with a torch in low light, because daylight hides what a raking beam finds on a cornice run.

The floors deserve a word of their own, because they trip up more DIY check-outs than anything except the oven. Original block parquet in a grander conversion wants a dry-buff, a dilute soap-and-water pass and a second dry-buff to keep the wax, not a wet mop that lifts it. The engineered board in a newer flat off the estates takes the maker’s own cleaner. Get the product wrong and you leave a dull patch that the check-in photos will not excuse. It is the sort of detail that sounds small until the deposit line arrives.

A tenant who left a mansion-block flat off the park last spring summed up the pattern well:

“Two-bed, third floor, no lift, and I had a long-haired cat the whole three years. The agent told me straight that pet hair on the carpet edges and under the wardrobe rail would be the deciding line on the deposit. Two cleaners came for most of a day, HEPA vacuum on the carpets, a soft brush on the old chrome in the bathroom. It passed on the first walk and the full deposit came back the week after.”
Aisha, 2-bed interwar flat, Kennington SE11 5

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

Pricing here is our standard London base, put against the actual property, not the postcode. Kennington is not a premium neighbourhood and we do not price it as one. What varies is the bedroom count and how much original detail there is to do by hand.

A whole-flat carpet on a two-bed is £115, and a 90cm range cooker is £114. Where a full end of tenancy is overkill, part jobs run at £30 per hour per cleaner. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape; a long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household or a smoker’s flat costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than on the invoice. No VAT on top, no fuel surcharge, no extra for a third-floor mansion flat with no lift.

Now the sum. A two-bed near the park sits on the far side of £4,000 of deposit, and the clean to protect it starts at £243. Most tenants only run that comparison after a DIY check-out has already failed, which is the expensive way round. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags a cleaning issue inside 48 hours and the flat is as we left it with nobody moved in, we come back and put it right free. Our 97% first-time pass rate is why agents keep our number, but the guarantee is the real point.

That track record reaches well beyond this park. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London and the home counties, and over the years the work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That number is the whole job in the end: money that stays with the tenant rather than the landlord.

Three jobs get muddled, so it is worth booking the right one.

End of tenancy clean

The hand-back clean, built to pass the letting agent’s check-out and get the deposit back, flat empty, with the 48-hour guarantee on it.

Deep clean

A one-off reset of a home you are staying in, no agent standard to hit, priced at £30 per hour per cleaner.

Regular clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance, from £22 an hour, the same cleaner kept on the home.

Domestic clean

Our general domestic cleaning service for households that want a hand rather than a move-out clean.

Add-ons often ride on the same visit. Carpet cleaning is the commonest deposit line in Lambeth, oven cleaning stands alone if that is all the agent pulled you up on, and hard floor restoration suits the original parquet in the grander conversions.

How we book it in

It is a short call. Tell us the postcode, the bedroom count and the move-out date, and we quote a fixed price on the phone. Carpet, oven type, listed-building points and parking on Kennington Park Road (the CPZ runs Monday to Saturday) get talked through then. We email a written confirmation with the start time and the team lead’s name.

On the day, the team is usually two to three cleaners depending on size, working to the 57-point list, with completion photos taken for your deposit file if you want them. If the clerk attends within 48 hours and flags anything on our list, we come back free. If they flag something off it, a chip in the parquet that predates you or a curtain gone yellow with age, that is an inventory dispute rather than a clean issue, and our dated photos back you up. It is worth having them: a timestamped set of before-and-after shots has settled more deposit arguments for our clients than any amount of back-and-forth on email. Nearby, we also cover Oval and Vauxhall on the same rota.

“I rang on a Monday for a Thursday move-out on Courtenay Street and half expected to be turned away that late in the month. They fitted it in, fixed quote on the call, no creep on the price after. The clerk from the agent passed it without a re-clean.”
Ben, 1-bed Georgian conversion, Courtenay Street SE11 5

Questions we get asked

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost around Kennington Park?

Studios from £156, one-beds from £207, two-beds from £243, three-beds from £339, four-beds from £425. SE11 sits at our standard London base. Property type matters more than postcode here: a two-bed mansion flat behind the park and a two-bed on one of the estates both start at £243 unless the flat has heavy original detail. Carpet shampoo, range cooker and double oven are priced on top.

Is Kennington a premium area for pricing?

No. We keep Kennington on the standard London base rate. The elegant Georgian fronts around Cleaver Square do not add a surcharge; a listed conversion just takes more careful hand work, which we build into the fixed quote, not into a higher tier.

How long does the clean take?

A two-bed conversion is six to seven hours with two cleaners. A three-bed terrace with original cornice and parquet runs eight or more. The interwar mansion flats go quicker per square foot than a listed terrace because the detail is simpler. Studios are usually a long morning. 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 never touch: paint, fair wear, the landlord’s furniture, the wax under a wardrobe that has stood there for years. What we guarantee is the cleaning. If the clerk flags a cleaning issue within 48 hours, we come back free under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Our first-time pass rate sits at 97%.

Do you handle the shared parts on a licensed HMO?

Yes. Communal stairs, the hallway, a shared kitchen or bathroom and the front entrance are priced as ordinary rooms, so you are not charged twice. Lambeth’s selective licensing in Kennington ward changed how a landlord documents the flat, not the cleaning standard at the end of the tenancy.

What about the hard-water scale on the chrome?

South London water runs very hard, around 300ppm calcium carbonate, so shower heads, screen runners, mixer taps and kettle elements need a proper descaler with dwell time and then a polish. Older chrome on the mansion-block stock wants a longer soak than newer fittings. We carry all of it. A generic kitchen spray will not lift set scale, which is where a lot of DIY check-outs come unstuck.

Do I need to be there?

No. Most clients leave a key with the letting agent or use a key safe at the flat. We send a written check-out note by email when we finish, and completion photos for the deposit file if you ask.

Do you bring all the products and kit?

Yes, everything, from the descaler for the hard water to the soft brushes we use on cast-iron register grates and old chrome. You do not need to leave anything behind.

What if my landlord uses a particular inventory firm?

Tell us the firm when you book. We have worked with most of the SE11 clerks and we brief the team to that firm’s quirks so nothing gets missed on the walk.

Can you clean while the flat is still part-furnished?

Better empty, but we work around stored furniture if it is confined to one room. We cannot shampoo carpet under a bed or dry-buff parquet under a sofa, and the clerk will see the difference, so it is worth clearing what you can.

Do you cover the estates as well as the period flats?

Yes. The postwar and later blocks west and south of the park, off Brixton Road and around Hanover Gardens, are regular bookings for us. The faults differ from the period stock, stairwell scuff and balcony glazing rather than cornice dust, and we send a team that knows the difference.

How quickly can you book me in?

Usually 48 to 72 hours’ notice across SE11. Same-day is sometimes possible if a team is finishing nearby around Cleaver Square or the Oval; ring the office to ask.

How do I pay?

Card on the day, bank transfer in advance, or cash if that is easier. We send an itemised invoice for the deposit file.