The Playtower and what a Ladywell clean is up against
End of tenancy cleaning
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The Ladywell Playtower opened in 1884 as one of the country’s first public baths. Its story since then is still unfinished:
- It took fire damage in 2006 and has spent decades on the edge of a redevelopment that keeps stalling.
- Goldsmiths was once in the running to turn it into an arts department.
- An approved cinema-and-homes scheme collapsed in 2025 when the council ended its deal with the developer.
- The council is now weighing fresh proposals, so none of it is settled.
What is settled is that the building gives the whole district its landmark, and the streets around it set the tone for the cleaning work we do here.
Ladywell is a small place with old housing. The terraces around Church Grove and Railway Terrace went up in the late 1850s, the same decade the railway and the cemetery arrived, and a good share of those houses have since been split into flats. That is the stock we clean most:
- tall ceilings
- deep skirting
- painted-shut window frames
- the kind of layered period detail an inventory clerk inspects closely at the end of a tenancy
A move-out clean here is a full reset of the property to the condition the check-in record describes, not a tidy.
Why Ladywell ward sits inside Lewisham’s licensing map
Ladywell is squarely in the London Borough of Lewisham, and that matters more than it sounds when a tenancy ends. Lewisham runs two property licensing schemes at once, and Ladywell ward is caught by both in the way that affects most renters.
A landlord under a licensing regime is an accountable landlord, and accountable landlords run far tighter check-outs.
Selective licensing, the big one for ordinary lets
- Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme came into force on 1 July 2024 and runs for five years.
- Ladywell is named in its second designation alongside Crofton Park, Evelyn, Lee Green and Sydenham.
- It covers standard single-household private lets, the everyday flat or house let to one family or one sharer group, that are not already caught by HMO rules.
- The scheme reaches most of the borough; only Telegraph Hill and a small slice of Blackheath sit outside it.
So if you rent a flat off Ladywell Road or a terrace near Hilly Fields, the odds are your landlord needs a selective licence for it.
The second scheme, for shared houses
An additional HMO licence has applied across the whole of Lewisham since 5 April 2022, and it catches smaller shared homes of three or four people from more than one household, which the national scheme leaves out.
The national mandatory scheme sits above both and bites at five or more occupants. A lot of the bigger Victorian houses near the station have been let as shares over the years, so the HMO rules are not academic around here.
Why does licensing change anything about cleaning? Because a licensed landlord can face real penalties for a poorly kept or unlicensed property, so they tend to use a proper check-in inventory and an independent clerk at the end.
That clerk works to a documented standard rather than a vague impression, and the clean has to clear that standard. Here are the terms that come up most when we talk it through with tenants:
- Selective licence
- The licence Lewisham requires for most ordinary private lets in designated wards, Ladywell among them, whatever the number of tenants. It is about the let itself, not overcrowding, and it has run since 1 July 2024.
- Additional HMO licence
- Lewisham’s own licence for smaller shared homes, where three or four tenants from different households live together, below the national five-person line. It has applied in every ward since 5 April 2022 and runs until April 2027.
- Mandatory HMO licence
- The national licence for shared homes with five or more occupants from two or more households. In Ladywell it sits alongside both of Lewisham’s local schemes.
- Check-in inventory
- Your photographed, dated record of how clean each room was and what state it was in on the day you moved in. The move-out clean only has to match what this record shows.
- Check-out report
- Written when the tenancy ends, it compares the property with the check-in inventory and lists anything your landlord may want to deduct from the deposit for.
If you are unsure whether your let needs a licence, your tenancy paperwork and the council’s register will tell you. It is the landlord’s job to hold the licence, not yours, but knowing the scheme exists explains why the check-out here is stricter than tenants expect.
A landlord under a licensing regime is an accountable landlord, and accountable landlords run far tighter check-outs.
The terraces, the conversions and the river-valley flats
Ladywell sits in the valley of the River Ravensbourne, and the river runs the length of Ladywell Fields, the chain of three green fields that links Ladywell to Catford.
A restoration project between 2007 and 2011 re-meandered the river through the middle of the park, with backwaters and new planting, and it won awards for it. The flats and houses that back onto that green strip are some of the more sought-after addresses here, and they are a fair part of our move-out work.
What the housing is
The housing itself is mostly Victorian and Edwardian.
- Ladywell Village
- The old commercial core along Ladywell Road, with period terraces and the flats above the Edwardian shops.
- The railway streets
- Church Grove, Railway Terrace, Prospect Place and Mercy Terrace went up as the railway arrived in the 1850s.
- Towards Hilly Fields
- Climb the slope toward the hilltop park, opened in 1896 after a campaign by Octavia Hill of the National Trust, and the houses get larger and grander.
- Newer building
- Scattered through too, especially toward Lewisham and the Ravensbourne, but the period stock is what defines the place.
That stock cleans in a particular way, and it is worth knowing before you book.
- The older flats carry hard limescale on taps and shower screens, because the water here scales up and a quick wipe just leaves a haze.
- The window frames in these conversions have been painted over so many times the channels need picking out by hand rather than a quick run with a cloth.
- The bigger period houses up toward Hilly Fields have the opposite issue, which is height: the tops of tall kitchen units, the cornicing and the picture rails go unreached for a whole tenancy and then turn up grey in the check-out photographs.
We have cleaned enough SE13 properties to read the building from the postcode and the floor it sits on.
Trains, and why the turnover is steady
Ladywell is well connected for such a quiet pocket, which is part of why the rental turnover is steady.
- Station
- Ladywell station, a Grade II building that opened in 1857, sits on Southeastern’s Hayes Line in zone 3.
- Direct trains
- London Bridge, Cannon Street, Waterloo East and Charing Cross.
That London Bridge run in under fifteen minutes is what keeps the flats here in demand with commuters, and steady demand means steady moving, which means a steady stream of check-outs that have to pass.
There is even history in the quieter corners. Ladywell Cemetery, opened in 1858 and now paired with the neighbouring Brockley cemetery, is a Victorian burial ground gone half wild, and the streets around it are some of the prettiest terraces in the district.
We mention it only because tenants are sometimes surprised how period the housing is once you step off the main road, and period housing is exactly the kind a clerk inspects line by line.
The conservation area
Ladywell Village itself, the commercial stretch along Ladywell Road, is a conservation area, and that is not just a planning label. A good number of the flats above those shops sit in protected Edwardian buildings put up at the turn of the last century, when the shops went in to serve the growing community around the new station.
Conservation status does not change how a property is cleaned, but it does tell you what you are dealing with:
- original sash and casement windows
- old timber floors under the carpet
- fittings that have been in place a very long time
A clerk inspecting a flat in a protected building tends to look harder at the period features, because those are the parts of the property the landlord most wants returned undamaged and clean.
We factor that in when we quote a Ladywell Road flat, and it is one more reason the fixed, size-based price beats a rushed hourly job here.
The 57-point clean, point by point
A move-out clean is a different animal from a weekly tidy. It is one visit, room by room, that resets the flat to the state a clerk expects to find when the keys go back.
The team works through our 57-point agent-approved checklist, the list our letting-agent clients sign off against, so the last room gets the same care as the first.
- Kitchen
- The oven, if you add it (from £31), is cleaned inside, the hob and extractor degreased, the fridge and freezer emptied and wiped out, and every cupboard done inside and out, including the tops above head height where grease settles. Scale comes off the taps, sink and splashback.
- Bathrooms
- The tiles and grout scrubbed, the shower screen and head descaled, the toilet cleaned all the way round including the base and the pipes behind it, and mirrors and chrome polished.
- Other rooms
- We wipe skirting and door frames, clean the internal glass and the insides of the windows, dust cornices and ceiling roses, and vacuum and mop throughout, reaching the corners and door backs that day-to-day cleaning skips.
In one of Jerrard’s houses on Vicars Hill or Algernon Road, the canted bays and their sashes add a good deal of frame, sill and glass to that list.
There is no hourly rate on this service. The price is set by the size of the property before the team arrives, so they stay until the checklist is finished without anyone watching the clock.
When a clerk does flag something, our 48-hour re-clean guarantee brings us back to put it right free of charge, provided the property was empty and had power and hot water on the day we cleaned.
That guarantee goes a long way to explaining why we are on the books of 300+ letting agents across south London, since agents only keep recommending a cleaner whose work gets past their clerks. Over the years the same approach has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have been swallowed by cleaning charges.
The checklist is why the clean holds up at inspection. A clerk marks against a written standard, and our 57 points line up with the items a check-out report itemises.
It has been adjusted over the years whenever clients told us about a deduction they had been hit with, so each line on it traces back to a real charge that somebody once had to pay. Following it room by room is how a clean ends up matching the report instead of an impression.
We need two things from you:
- Clear the flat of your belongings so every surface is reachable.
- Keep the electricity and hot water on, since neither a kitchen nor a bathroom can be deep cleaned without them.
If either could be a problem, a prepayment meter running low, say, or a boiler already switched off, tell us beforehand and we will plan round it.
Where SE13 deposits leak at check-out
In our experience cleaning is the charge that turns up most often on a check-out report, and it is also the easiest one to prevent. The rules are simpler than many tenants think.
- What a landlord cannot do
- Make paying for professional cleaning a condition of the tenancy. Shelter’s page on cleaning deductions puts it bluntly: fees like that are banned.
- What a landlord can insist on
- That the home goes back as clean as the check-in inventory shows, allowing for fair wear and tear.
So the real question at the end of a Ladywell let is how closely the flat matches its starting point on paper. In Ladywell specifically, a handful of things trip people up:
- The painted window frames in the older conversions. Tenants clean the glass and forget the frames and channels, where years of grime sit, and a clerk in a period flat will check them.
- Limescale, because the taps and shower screens here scale up and a fast wipe leaves a film that reads as neglect.
- Height, in the larger period houses toward Hilly Fields: the tops of tall units, the cornicing and the picture rails go unreached all tenancy and then show grey in the photographs.
- Ovens, which catch out more people than anything else on this list. Tenants scrub the door glass and leave the racks, the grill pan and the roof of the cavity, which are among the first places a clerk checks.
When a deduction does land, remember that your deposit must sit in one of the three government-approved schemes, and each runs a free dispute service that rules on evidence. Citizens Advice walks through the process, including the usual three-month limit for making a claim after you move out.
The adjudicator weighs the check-in and check-out reports, photos and receipts, and a professional clean done against an itemised checklist gives you a straight reply to a cleaning charge. That reply is worth far more than the clean costs when a deposit can be as much as five weeks’ rent.
A worked example
- Check-in report
- Records a clean oven, clean carpets and scale-free bathroom taps.
- Check-out
- The clerk photographs grease in the oven cavity, a mark on the living-room carpet and a white crust round the taps. That is three separate line items.
With a receipt for a professional clean done to a checklist, and your own dated photos taken after it, you have something solid to put in front of the scheme’s adjudicator and a real chance of getting the charge removed. Without them it is your word against a dated photograph, and the photograph usually wins.
The legal backdrop has changed as well. The tenancy reforms in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 started on 1 May 2026, ending Section 21 evictions and moving tenancies onto periodic terms.
Deposits are still protected, and disputes still go to the scheme holding the money, so clear check-out evidence matters as much as it ever did.
What an end of tenancy clean costs in Ladywell
Size sets the price. With a fixed quote the team stays until all 57 points are done, whether that takes four hours or eight, and you know the figure in advance.
- Studio
- £156
- One-bedroom flat
- £207
- Two bedrooms
- £243
- Three bedrooms
- £339
- Four bedrooms
- £425
- Hourly cleaning
- £30 per cleaner, for smaller jobs: a couple of rooms, for example, or a freshen-up before a mid-tenancy inspection
Those are our full end of tenancy rates, with nothing held back to add on later.
Most Ladywell lets fall into the first three bands. Flats in the converted Victorian houses and above the Edwardian shops on Ladywell Road are usually one or two bedrooms, while whole houses on the slopes below Hilly Fields tend to need the three- or four-bedroom rate.
If a place is unusually big or has been left in a poor state, we say so during the call and price it honestly, with no surcharge sprung on the day.
On a full move-out the fixed price nearly always works out better than hourly, because the clean has to satisfy a checklist and a clerk, and open-ended hours rarely manage that for less money.
Run the numbers against your deposit before deciding:
- Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019 a deposit is capped at five weeks’ rent for most tenancies, and on a two-bedroom flat in SE13 that is a substantial sum.
- Cleaning is the charge most likely to eat into it.
- Set the £243 two-bedroom clean against a few hundred pounds held back for a poor finish, and the clean has paid for itself as soon as it heads off a single deduction.
That is the calculation most people are doing when they ring us, and it is the honest case for a fixed professional clean over a rushed weekend with a mop.
Carpets, ovens and the add-ons worth booking
Now and then a move-out needs more than the standard package, and adding it at booking costs less than failing the check-out and paying twice. These are the extras Ladywell tenants ask about most.
Carpets
Carpet comes first in most of these flats. Fitted carpet in an older let picks up walkways and the odd spill over a tenancy, and an inventory that says clean carpet will expect clean carpet at the end. We steam clean at:
- £29 per bedroom
- £36 for a living room
- £94 for two bedrooms and a living room, the size most lets here come in
Our carpet cleaning service can also take the job on by itself if you would rather hand it over completely.
Ovens
The oven fails more check-outs than any other single item, and a cavity caked in burnt fat is close to a certain deduction.
- Added to our end of tenancy clean
- £31 for a single and £62 for a double or a range cooker
- On its own
- It goes to our oven cleaning service at £77, £110 and £143
Mention a range when you book, since the larger kitchens in the family houses sometimes have one.
Sofas and outside glass
- In a furnished let, a sofa that the inventory listed as clean and now carries marks is another easy charge, and upholstery cleaning takes care of sofas and armchairs.
- Outside glass matters in ground-floor and lower flats where the clerk can see it, and we bring kit for exterior panes where access is safe.
The conservation-area houses mostly face the street with canted bay windows, so their glass is the first thing a clerk sees on the way in. If the last of your furniture is still going out on the morning of the clean, talk to us about timing so we start on an empty flat.
Booking, keys and the parking around Ladywell Road
Booking takes three steps
- Your postcode and the property. The form gives the price.
- A date that suits you. Seven days a week.
- We confirm it with you by phone or WhatsApp.
0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
Booking takes one call to 0333 555 2076, with no survey and no booking deposit.
- By phone
- Give us the address, the bedroom count and your move-out date and you will have a fixed quote before you hang up.
- By email
- If you prefer writing, email office@monstercleaning.com and we reply with the same fixed figure.
- Weekends
- Slots are available, which helps when a tenancy ends on a Friday or Saturday and the check-out is booked for Monday morning.
Getting to the door takes some planning here. The Jerrard streets climb the slope towards Hilly Fields, and Vicars Hill, Algernon Road and Embleton Road were laid out in the 1880s and 1890s, long before anyone planned for vans. Kerb space can be tight, and a top-floor flat can mean a long carry up several flights.
Parking is added only where it is needed, at what it costs. We would simply like to know in advance whether there is a loading spot, a permit bay or a long walk from the road, so the team arrives ready instead of circling the block looking for somewhere to stop.
We clean across the wider area too, so if your move sits on the edge of Ladywell the same team covers it:
- Our Brockley end of tenancy cleaning page picks up the streets to the north around the shared cemetery.
- Our Catford end of tenancy cleaning page covers the far end of Ladywell Fields, upriver to the south.
- Our Hither Green end of tenancy cleaning page handles the terraces just east across the railway.
Ladywell itself sits under our Lewisham end of tenancy cleaning hub, which covers the borough-wide bookings and points you to the rest of the south-east.
On the day:
- The team brings everything: the machines, the products and the checklist.
- You leave the water and power on.
- Hand over the keys or let us in, then collect them once the clean has passed, or have the agent pick them up for the check-out.
Questions Ladywell tenants ask us
Is my Ladywell flat covered by Lewisham’s selective licensing?
Most likely, yes. Ladywell ward is named in Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme, which began on 1 July 2024 and covers ordinary single-household private lets. The scheme reaches almost the whole borough, with only Telegraph Hill and a small part of Blackheath left out. It is the landlord’s job to hold the licence, but its existence is why check-outs here are stricter than tenants expect.
Is a professional clean a legal requirement when I move out?
It is not. Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019 a landlord cannot make paying for professional cleaning a condition of your tenancy. Your duty is to hand the property back as clean as the check-in inventory records, fair wear and tear aside. Most tenants who book us do so because a professional clean meets that standard reliably and leaves a receipt to show if a deduction is disputed.
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Ladywell?
The price is fixed by size: a studio is £156, a one-bedroom flat £207, two bedrooms £243, three £339 and four £425. An end of tenancy clean is never charged by the hour, so the team stays until the checklist is complete.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
It is our promise to come back. If the inventory clerk or agent questions our work at check-out and you let us know within 48 hours, we re-clean the items concerned free of charge. It applies where the property was empty and had power and hot water when we cleaned.
Do you clean the inside of the oven?
We do. The inside of the oven, racks and cavity included, is an add-on to any end of tenancy clean, from £31. For a heavily built-up oven, or one you want done as a separate job, our oven service costs £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £143 for a range cooker.
Should I add carpet cleaning to my booking?
Add it if the check-in report says the carpets were clean and yours now show walkways or stains. Steam cleaning is £29 per bedroom, £36 for a living room or £94 for two bedrooms and a living room. Carpet marks are among the commonest charges in older Ladywell lets, so it usually earns its cost back.
Why does the property need to be empty?
Because we clean inside every cupboard, behind the appliances and right into the corners, and boxes or furniture get in the way. An empty flat also looks the way the clerk will see it at check-out. If you cannot clear everything in time, ring us and we will rework the timing.
Do you work weekends in SE13?
We do, every weekend. Seven-day working suits Ladywell tenancies that finish on a Friday or Saturday ahead of a Monday check-out. Weekend slots around the end of the month go quickly, so ring early for the best choice of time.
How far in advance should I book?
A few days’ notice normally does it. Month-end is the busy period in SE13 because so many tenancies change hands then, so as soon as your move-out date is firm, book it and hold the slot you want, particularly if it falls on a weekend.
Can you clean the windows as well?
Inside glass is part of the standard clean. Outside, we can do ground-floor and lower flats where access is safe, which covers a good share of the conversions near Ladywell Road and the station. Mention it when you book so the team brings the right equipment.
What if I am moving just outside Ladywell?
We cover the surrounding areas with the same team and the same fixed pricing. Brockley sits to the north by the shared cemetery, Catford is at the southern end of Ladywell Fields, and Hither Green is just east across the railway. Wherever the move is, the checklist and the guarantee are the same.
Will the quote change once the team sees the flat?
No. The end of tenancy price depends on the size of the property and carries no hourly add-ons. Genuine extras, such as carpet steam cleaning or a separate oven clean, are priced and agreed at booking and never added afterwards. If the property turns out far larger or in a much rougher state than described, we will tell you during the call.
Do you clean the larger period houses up toward Hilly Fields?
Yes, regularly. The bigger Victorian houses on the slopes around Hilly Fields, including the red and yellow brick houses Samuel Jerrard built along Vicars Hill in the 1880s and 1890s, have more rooms, higher ceilings and plaster detail that is awkward to reach, so they usually fall into the three- or four-bedroom band. A range cooker is priced separately. Once we know the number of bedrooms, the fixed quote applies.
Can my landlord insist I use a specific cleaning company?
No. A landlord cannot make you use a particular cleaner, or charge you for one, as a term of the tenancy. You can book any company you like or do the work yourself, provided the property goes back at the check-in standard. People mostly choose a professional clean for the receipt and the guarantee, since nothing obliges them to.