The Playtower and what a Ladywell clean is up against
The Ladywell Playtower opened in 1884 as one of the country’s first public baths, 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; the current plan leans toward a cinema and cafe. None of that 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 and 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.
The big one for ordinary lets is selective licensing. Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme came into force on 1 July 2024 and runs for five years, and 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 is 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, and that clerk works to a documented standard rather than a vague impression. 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
- A Lewisham-wide licence for smaller shared houses, three or four people from different households, that fall below the national five-person threshold. Live across the borough since 5 April 2022.
- Mandatory HMO licence
- The national scheme for larger shared homes of five or more people from two or more households. It applies on top of Lewisham’s own schemes.
- Check-in inventory
- The dated, usually photographed record of the property’s condition and cleanliness when you moved in. Your clean at the end is judged against this document, not against showroom perfection.
- Check-out report
- The inspection at the end of the tenancy that compares the property to the check-in inventory and lists anything the landlord may try to charge against your deposit.
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.
The housing itself is mostly Victorian and Edwardian. Around Ladywell Village, the old commercial core along Ladywell Road, you get period terraces and the flats above the Edwardian shops, plus the streets like Church Grove, Railway Terrace, Prospect Place and Mercy Terrace that went up as the railway arrived in the 1850s. Climb the slope toward Hilly Fields, the hilltop park opened in 1896 after a campaign by Octavia Hill of the National Trust, and the houses get larger and grander. There is 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.
Ladywell is well connected for such a quiet pocket, which is part of why the rental turnover is steady. Ladywell station, a Grade II building that opened in 1857, sits on Southeastern’s Hayes Line in zone 3, with direct trains to 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.
Ladywell Village itself, the commercial stretch along Ladywell Road, is a conservation area, and that is not just a planning label. It means 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, and 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
An end of tenancy clean is not a larger version of your fortnightly tidy. It is a fixed, room-by-room reset of the whole property to the condition a clerk expects when the keys go back. We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, the same one our letting-agent clients sign off against, so nothing gets skipped because someone ran out of steam by the last room.
In the kitchen that means the oven cleaned inside, the hob and extractor degreased, the fridge and freezer emptied and wiped, and the cupboards done inside and out, including the tops above head height that collect grease and dust. Limescale comes off the taps, the sink and the splashbacks. In the bathroom we scrub tiles and grout, descale the shower screen and head, clean the toilet properly including the base and behind it, and polish the mirrors and chrome. Through the rest of the flat we wipe skirting and door frames, clean the internal glass and the insides of the windows, dust the cornicing those period rooms are full of, vacuum and mop throughout, and reach the corners and the backs of doors that everyday cleaning misses.
We do not charge by the hour for this. The price is fixed on the size of the property, so the cleaners stay until the checklist is complete instead of watching a clock, and you know the figure before they arrive. Our first-time pass rate sits at 97%, and on the rare job a clerk flags, our 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we come back and put it right at no cost, provided the property was empty and had power and hot water when we cleaned. That guarantee is a large part of why we are on the books of 300+ letting agents across south London, agents who only keep recommending a cleaner whose work clears their clerks. Over the years that approach has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have vanished into cleaning deductions.
The checklist is the reason the clean holds up. A clerk does not grade on effort; they grade against a written standard, and a 57-point list maps onto the very things a check-out report itemises. We have been doing this since 2014, almost all of it in south London, and the list has been refined over those years by the deductions our clients told us they were hit with. It is not a generic tick sheet pulled off the internet. It is the running record of what goes wrong at check-out, turned into a clean.
Two practical conditions. The property needs to be empty of your belongings so we can reach every surface, and it needs working electricity and hot water, because you cannot deep clean a kitchen or a bathroom without either. Tell us in advance if access to either is a problem and we will plan around it.
Where SE13 deposits leak at check-out
Cleaning is the single most common reason landlords keep part of a deposit, and it is also the most avoidable. The rules are clearer than most tenants think. A landlord cannot make you pay for professional cleaning as a blanket condition of the tenancy, and Shelter sets this out plainly: such fees are banned. What a landlord can do is hold you to returning the place at the same standard as the check-in inventory, fair wear and tear aside. So the argument is almost never about whether you cleaned. It is about whether you cleaned back to the documented starting point.
In Ladywell specifically, a handful of things trip people up. The painted window frames in the older conversions are one. 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 is another, because the taps and shower screens here scale up and a fast wipe leaves a film that reads as neglect. The larger period houses toward Hilly Fields have the height problem instead: the tops of tall units, the cornicing and the picture rails go unreached all tenancy and then show grey in the photographs.
Ovens are the classic. People scrub the door glass, leave the racks and the roof of the cavity, and lose forty or fifty pounds for it. If your deposit is protected, and it must be in one of the three government-approved schemes, every one of those schemes runs a free dispute service, and they decide on evidence. Citizens Advice explains the process, including the free alternative dispute resolution service and the three-month window to use it. The check-in inventory and the check-out report are the evidence those adjudicators weigh. A professional clean with an itemised checklist behind it gives you a clear answer to a deduction, which is worth far more than the cost of the clean when a Ladywell deposit runs into four figures.
A worked example helps. Say your check-in inventory recorded a clean oven, clean carpets and limescale-free taps, and at check-out the clerk photographs a greasy oven cavity, a marked living-room carpet and scaled-up bathroom taps. That is three line items, and on a typical Ladywell flat a landlord might try to take sixty to a hundred and twenty pounds for the lot. With a professional clean done to the checklist and a receipt to show for it, you can put that evidence to the scheme’s adjudicator and the deduction usually falls away. Without it, you are arguing your word against a dated photograph, and the photograph tends to win.
The law is shifting too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 is changing how tenancies end, with provisions coming into force through 2026, and it puts more weight on a fair, evidenced process at the close of a let. Good check-out records matter more under it, not less.
What an end of tenancy clean costs in Ladywell
The price depends on size, not hours. That is the whole point of a fixed quote: the team stays until the 57-point list is done, whether that takes four hours or eight. Our end of tenancy prices run from £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bedroom flat, £243 for two bedrooms, £339 for three bedrooms, and £425 for a four-bedroom property. Those are the full prices, with nothing held back to add on later.
For most Ladywell tenancies that covers it. The one and two-bedroom rates fit the converted flats around Ladywell Road and the station, while the three and four-bedroom rates suit the larger houses up toward Hilly Fields. If a property is unusually large or has been left in a rough state, we say so on the call and quote it honestly rather than springing a surcharge on the day.
We also offer cleaning by the hour at £30 per cleaner for jobs that are not a full move-out, say a part-clean of a couple of rooms or a top-up before an inspection. For an end of tenancy, though, the fixed size-based price is almost always the better deal, because the clean has to satisfy a checklist and a clerk, and an open-ended hourly job rarely does that for less.
It is worth doing the sums against the deposit. A deposit on a two-bedroom Ladywell flat is commonly five weeks’ rent, which around here runs well into four figures, and cleaning is the deduction most likely to eat into it. Set the £243 two-bedroom clean against the few hundred pounds a landlord can withhold for a poor finish and the clean pays for itself the moment it stops one deduction. That is the calculation most of our SE13 customers are making when they ring, and it is the honest reason a fixed professional clean beats a rushed weekend of your own.
Carpets, ovens and the add-ons worth booking
Some move-out jobs need more than the standard clean, and it is cheaper to add it upfront than to fail a check-out and pay twice. A few extras come up again and again in Ladywell.
Carpets are the big one in these flats. Older Ladywell lets often have fitted carpet that has held traffic marks and the odd stain across a tenancy, and a check-in inventory that recorded clean carpet will expect clean carpet back. We steam clean carpets at £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bedroom flat, which is the common size here. If you would rather hand the whole problem over, our deep carpet cleaning service covers it as a standalone job.
Then there is the oven, which fails more check-outs on its own than anything else. A built-up oven full of burnt-on grease is a near-guaranteed deduction. We clean ovens as part of the end of tenancy package, but if yours is badly neglected or you want it handled separately, our oven cleaning service runs at £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double, and £114 for a range cooker, the last common in the bigger kitchens up toward Hilly Fields.
Upholstery is worth a look in furnished lets, where a marked sofa recorded as clean at check-in is another easy deduction, and our upholstery cleaning service handles sofas and armchairs the inventory listed as spotless. Window exteriors matter in the ground-floor and lower flats where a clerk can see them, and we come equipped for the outside glass where access allows. If your move involves shifting the last of the furniture before we clean, ask about timing so the clean lands on an empty property.
Booking, keys and the parking around Ladywell Road
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 and tell us the address, the number of bedrooms, and your move-out date, and you get a fixed quote on the spot. There is no survey and no deposit to book. You can also email [email protected] if you would rather put it in writing, and we reply with the same fixed figure. We work weekends, which matters when most tenancies end on a Friday or Saturday with the check-out booked for the Monday.
Parking is the genuine headache around here, and it is worth a word when you book. The terraced streets off Ladywell Road are narrow and often permit-controlled, and the roads near the station fill up early with commuter cars. Getting a van and equipment to a top-floor flat on one of those streets takes longer than a place with a driveway. None of that changes your price. It just means we would rather know in advance whether there is a loading spot, a permit bay, or a long carry, so the team turns up prepared instead of circling the block.
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 where the river runs on south, and 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 supply nothing. 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.
Do I legally have to pay for a professional end of tenancy clean?
No. A landlord cannot make professional cleaning a blanket condition of your tenancy; those fees are banned. What you do have to do is return the property at the same standard as the check-in inventory, fair wear and tear aside. Most tenants book a professional clean because it meets that standard reliably and gives them evidence if a deduction is disputed.
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Ladywell?
Prices are fixed on the size of the property: £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bedroom flat, £243 for two bedrooms, £339 for three bedrooms and £425 for a four-bedroom home. There is no hourly charge for an end of tenancy clean, so the team stays until the checklist is finished.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or agent challenges our work at the check-out, we come back and re-clean the items in question at no charge, as long as you tell us within 48 hours. It applies when the property was empty and had power and hot water at the time of the clean. Our first-time pass rate is 97%, so it is rarely needed.
Do you clean the inside of the oven?
Yes, the oven is cleaned inside as part of the standard end of tenancy package, including the racks and the cavity. If yours is heavily built up or you want it handled separately, our oven cleaning service is £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker.
Should I add carpet cleaning to my booking?
If the check-in inventory recorded clean carpets and yours now show traffic marks or stains, yes. Steam cleaning costs £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bedroom flat. Carpet marks are one of the more common deductions in older Ladywell lets, so it usually pays for itself.
Why does the property need to be empty?
We clean every surface, including inside cupboards, behind appliances and into corners, and furniture or boxes block that. An empty property also matches how the clerk inspects it at check-out. If you cannot clear everything in time, call us and we will work out the timing.
Do you work weekends in SE13?
Yes. We clean seven days a week, which suits Ladywell tenancies that end on a Friday or Saturday with a Monday check-out. Weekend slots get booked up around month-end, so the earlier you call the better your choice of time.
How far in advance should I book?
A few days is usually enough, but the end of the month is busy across SE13 because so many tenancies turn over then. If your move-out date is fixed, book as soon as you have it to lock in the slot you want, especially for a weekend.
Can you clean the windows as well?
We clean the inside of all windows as standard. For the outside, we can do ground-floor and lower flats where there is safe access, which covers a lot of the conversions around Ladywell Road. Tell us when you book so we bring the right kit.
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.
Is the price really fixed, or are there extras on the day?
The end of tenancy price is fixed on the size of the property and we do not add hourly charges to it. Genuine extras, like steam cleaning carpets or a separate oven deep clean, are priced and agreed when you book, never sprung on you afterwards. If a property is far larger or rougher than described, we tell you on the call.
Do you clean the larger period houses up toward Hilly Fields?
Yes, and they are some of our regular jobs in SE13. The bigger Victorian houses near Hilly Fields have more rooms, taller ceilings and harder-to-reach cornicing and units, so they fall into the three or four-bedroom price band. Range cookers are common in those kitchens, which is why we price range oven cleaning separately. The fixed quote still applies once we know the bedroom count.
Can my landlord insist I use a specific cleaning company?
No. Your landlord cannot require you to use a named cleaner or charge you for it as a condition of the tenancy. You are free to book whoever you like, or to clean it yourself, as long as the property goes back at the check-in standard. Most tenants choose a professional clean for the evidence and the guarantee, not because they are obliged to.