End of tenancy cleaning in Lavender Hill

On a Lavender Hill conversion the clerk goes for the kitchen extractor first, because these are the flats where a north-facing galley has sat above a chip shop or a coffee roaster for years and the grease has gone amber on the hood. That one detail, filter housing and all, decides more SW11 deductions than carpets do. So an end-of-tenancy clean on this street has to be built for the person writing the check-out report, not for a tidy Sunday: room by room, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the clerk’s own list. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a fixed price in three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SW11 stretch of Lavender Hill end to end, plus the streets running off it into Battersea and up toward Clapham Junction. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Wandsworth.

How the check-in report quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does, and it is the whole game. When you moved into the flat, an inventory clerk walked it and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the word “clean” or “as new” against the kitchen and bathroom. Those words were true on the day, because the flat had just been professionally cleaned before you got the keys. At check-out a clerk reads the two reports side by side, and anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, becomes a line you can be charged for. You are marked against a professional clean. That is why a mop and a free weekend rarely gets a sharer flat over the line on this stretch.

The money is not abstract. On the Lavender Hill DIY check-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a familiar shape: roughly £45 to £90 for degreasing the kitchen extractor and the wall behind the hob, £60 to £115 for descaling the whole bathroom, £80 to £150 for carpet shampooing, and £200 or more where the professional clean is simply missing. Put that against a two-bed conversion carrying a deposit north of £2,000 and the sum makes itself. Most tenants only run it after they have failed the check-out and lost the opening round, which is the expensive way about, because the opening round is the cheap one to win.

Why is the clerk so exact here? The deposit is real money the agent has to account for, and most SW11 clerks are trained to the AIIC inventory standard, so the walk-through is genuinely adversarial. You turn up with evidence rather than optimism, and the cleanest evidence is a dated professional invoice with a photo set behind it. In law your deposit sits in one of the three government-backed schemes, and if the deductions are disputed each scheme runs free adjudication where the better-documented side wins.

Check-in inventory report

The document a clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a vague idea of tidy.

End-of-tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, done to the letting-agent benchmark with the flat empty, carrying the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, at £30 per hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A reset of a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit and no check-out attached. Same price band, no re-clean, because there is no inventory to fail.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing upkeep of a flat you still live in, weekly or fortnightly, surfaces and floors, not behind the appliances. From £22 an hour.

What 1 July 2025 changed for Lavender Hill lets

Two things landed on Wandsworth renters in the last year, and they get muddled, so here is the honest version for this street.

First, the national one. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a rolling periodic tenancy, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting out a fixed term. The part people get wrong is that the cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The check-in benchmark still applies and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing, and on a high-churn street of sharer flats that means more move-outs, spread less predictably through the year.

Second, the local one. Wandsworth Council brought in new landlord licensing on 1 July 2025. Borough-wide additional HMO licensing now covers any house or flat shared by three or four people from different households, running for five years, on top of the long-standing mandatory HMO licence for five sharers or more. A lot of the flats above the shops are exactly that kind of sharer let, so the licensing bites here even though the clean does not change.

What did not happen here is selective licensing. The council also ran two selective schemes, but they are ward-specific: the first, from 1 July 2025, covers Furzedown, South Balham, Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway, and the second, from 1 April 2026, covers East Putney, Northcote and West Putney. Lavender Hill sits in the Shaftesbury and Queenstown ward, which is in neither. So a single-household flat here does not need a selective licence, but a three or four-sharer flat does need the additional HMO one. If your landlord should hold that licence and does not, the council can fine them up to £30,000, and you may be able to claim a Rent Repayment Order for up to twelve months’ rent. The council’s property licence check settles it for your exact address.

None of that is a cleaning issue, but it does change the stance you take into a deposit dispute. If your landlord is unlicensed where the law now says they should be licensed, the deductions conversation tilts your way before it has even started.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. What changed is timing.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every Lavender Hill booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what SW11 clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job. Cleaners arrive in a sign-written van with their own kit, hot water, descaler, degreaser and steam, and the flat needs to be empty before they start. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of it is won or lost

The cooker is pulled out and the wall behind it degreased. The extractor hood comes down, the filter is soaked or swapped, and the housing is done properly, because that is the first thing the clerk looks up into on this street. The oven is stripped rather than wiped: where the door comes off it comes off, the racks soak, the glass is split and de-carbonised, the side panels and fan housing degreased. Hob, trim, gas burners or induction top all scrubbed. Microwave inside, out and underneath. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them the night before, seals included. Dishwasher filter, spray arm and door seal. Washing machine drum, the detergent drawer out and scrubbed, and the rubber door seal where the black bloom hides. Every cupboard inside and out, plinths wiped. Splashback tiles, grout and the silicone bead. Sink, tap and drainer descaled, including the scale ring under the tap base. Floor mopped, the bin moved and the floor under it done.

The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong

Descaler goes on everything that has spotted first: taps, shower head, screen, tiles. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done fully: bowl, under the rim, cistern, base, hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk.
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole; the silicone where the bath meets the tiles.
• Shower screen both sides, the frame, the tracks and the sealant bead; tray or over-bath, drain, hose and head.
• Grout run over with a brush, wall and floor, particularly the joints around the toilet and behind the taps.
• Mirror, cabinet, shaving point and light pull; the extractor cover off and cleaned.
• Floor mopped into the corners and behind the loo; heated towel rail wiped down.

Bedrooms, living rooms and the bits between

Carpets vacuumed hard along the skirting and under where furniture stood, hard floors mopped with the right product for the board. Skirting top edges wiped, because in these old terraces that is where the dust settles above head height. Wardrobes and drawers inside and out, and the top of the wardrobe you cannot see from the floor. Light switches and sockets degreased of fingerprint shadow. Door handles and the paint around them, which take the most contact and which a clerk checks with the back of a hand. Window sills, reveals and the inside faces of the glass; the older flats keep their original box sash windows, and those runners and catches get slow careful work. Radiators on top, behind and under. Curtain rails and any pelmet. Picture-rail tops where the flat still has them. Cobwebs out of the ceiling corners, dust off the top of the boiler casing.

Two of these often need a pass of their own. A professional carpet clean is written into some SW11 tenancies as a hard requirement, which the carpet add-on covers on the same visit. Hard-used sofas in a long sharer let sometimes want full upholstery cleaning rather than a vacuum, and we say so on the phone if the booking sounds like one.

Then everything shared: the hallway floor and any stair treads, the banister, all internal doors both sides with their frames, the front door inside and out, the letterbox, the intercom handset, the meter cupboard if it opens. A final walk-through, photographed before and after. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

What Thames Water does to an SW11 bathroom

SW11 is deep in London’s hard-water belt, and that one fact quietly loses more deposits on this street than anything except the kitchen. Thames Water for this postcode runs at around 300 mg per litre of calcium carbonate, firmly in the very-hard band, which you can check on the Thames Water hardness page. Kettles fur in a couple of months. Shower screens cloud. Taps spot. Scale sets into the tile joints and around the base of every tap, and a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for it: a thumbnail down the tap, the screen held edge-on to the light, the shower head pulled in close.

So the descaling is not an afterthought on these jobs, it is half the bathroom. Scale hardened onto chrome is a slow job, and in the flats with older or original fittings we keep off the brute-force descalers a modern resin shower would shrug off, because a pitted tap is a bigger deduction than the scale ever was. Grout is the other one, the line between a pass and a charge here more often than carpets are. We scrub it back rather than wipe it, and where it is past saving we photograph the state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for a grey line that was already grey in the check-in pictures.

Scale that has hardened onto chrome is a slow job, and it is half the bathroom on this street.

That dated photograph has settled more disputes than any argument has. It is timestamped, it sits with the invoice, and an adjudicator leans toward the side that brought the evidence.

The street itself: what changes as you walk the mile

Lavender Hill runs roughly a mile, from the Clapham Junction end down toward where it meets Queenstown Road, and the housing shifts under you as you walk it. Clapham Junction, just off the west end, is Britain’s busiest railway interchange, a large part of why this stretch churns so hard: it is a sharer street, full of one-year lets and couples who move on. Halfway along sits the Battersea Arts Centre, in the old Battersea Town Hall, with the shops and restaurants running the length of it. The stock behind the shopfronts is not one thing, and one cleaning method does not pass all of it.

The conversions above and behind the shops

Most of what we clean here is flats carved out of late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces, upper and lower maisonettes and three or four-sharer flats, the kind the additional HMO licence now covers. These have had two or three conversion waves over the decades, so you get an original tiled hall on the ground floor and a kitchen that is either eighteen months old or last touched in the nineties. Long sharer tenancies leave build-up where nobody cleans between flatmates: behind the cooker, the top edge of the door frames, the grout of that tiled hall. The streets we are on most weeks are the terraces running off the hill, Eland Road, Sheepcote Lane, Sisters Avenue and the roads toward Battersea Park Road.

The mansion blocks and the newer flats

Then there are the 1930s mansion blocks, with their own quirks: north-facing kitchens, older extraction, and silicone seals that bloom black behind the sink where cooking moisture never quite clears. We descale, we steam the seals, and where mould has gone past the surface we tell you straight to log it with the landlord as a maintenance issue rather than pretend we can get it back to white. Nearer Queenstown Road there is newer infill: white-laminate kitchens and resin shower trays where a shampoo bottle leaves a brown ring.

The estates and the edges

There are ex-council homes too, the Shaftesbury Estate and Park Town on the Battersea side, solid brick with layouts we have seen many times. We travel a little further on a quote, up toward Clapham Common or across to the Northcote Road side, but the team is on the hill itself most weekdays. If your flat straddles the edge, ring with the postcode and we will tell you whether it is us or a neighbouring round.

Those neighbouring rounds are all real, if your next flat is one over or your tenancy sits on a boundary: Clapham Junction, Battersea, Northcote Road, Clapham Common, Wandsworth Town and Earlsfield.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until it is too late

Lavender Hill is a base-tier postcode for us. The prices below are the same we charge across most of Wandsworth, with no local uplift; the premium rates only apply north of the river in the village postcodes, not here.

Carpet shampoo as an add-on on the same visit: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted flat. Oven add-on: £77 for a single, £110 for a double, £114 for a 90cm range, which a few of the refitted mansion-block kitchens now have. Every price includes VAT, materials, kit, hot water and travel inside SW11. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long sharer tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or somewhere untouched for years costs more, and we say so on the phone, not after. No surprise lines on the invoice.

Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed at £243 to protect a deposit above £2,000 is barely a decision. Every Lavender Hill booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us in that window and nobody has moved in behind you. Our first-time pass rate across the Wandsworth book sits at 97%, so a recall is rare. There is a reason SW11 agents know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

Pay on completion, card or bank transfer, and we invoice on company paper if you need it for the deposit paperwork.

A job off Eland Road from May

“Three of us had shared a converted two-bed off Eland Road for two years and the kitchen extractor was a state, right above where we cooked every night. I had braced for a fight over the deposit. Monster sent two cleaners for five hours, stripped the oven, did the extractor housing and the carpets in both bedrooms. The check-out clerk flagged one thing, a mark on a bedroom windowsill I would never have spotted, and they came back the next morning and sorted it in half an hour, no charge. We got the full deposit split three ways. Best money we spent on the whole move.”
Priya, ex-tenant, Eland Road SW11, May 2026

That is a fair example of the pattern here: a long sharer tenancy, a kitchen nobody had properly degreased, a carpet clause, and a clerk who checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake, as it usually does. What turned it was not only the scrubbing but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, the part a DIY check-out almost never has when the agent pushes back.

Booking it, and the month-end squeeze

Lavender Hill clusters its check-outs hard at month-end, the way most sharer streets do. The last two or three days fill first, and someone who rings on the 29th for the 31st is often out of luck. Book early for those windows. The steps are simple.

1. Send the address and check-out date. Phone 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the bed count, whether there is carpet, and which agent is running the check-out.
2. We quote a fixed price. Same day in office hours, a real number rather than a range, based on the bed count and any add-ons.
3. You confirm. Reply or text the number and we hold the slot. No deposit needed, payment on completion. Allow 7 to 10 days for an end-of-month slot, 3 to 5 mid-month.
4. We turn up. Sign-written van, two or three cleaners, kit and water on board. Most jobs run three to six hours depending on size and state.
5. You or the agent inspect. Anything flagged inside 48 hours that sits in our scope, we come back and fix free.

One honest word on access. Parking on and around the hill is controlled and tight, so tell us the arrangement when you book, and confirm how we get in: your key, a key safe, or the agent letting us in. Sorting that in advance takes the sting out of the day.

Questions we get asked

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost on Lavender Hill?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Small top-ups are £30 per hour per cleaner. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom or £115 for a whole two-bed flat, and the oven add-on runs £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a 90cm range. Every price includes VAT and travel inside SW11.

Do you cover the whole of SW11 and the streets off Lavender Hill?

Yes. The flats above the shops the length of the hill, the terraces running off it such as Eland Road, Sheepcote Lane and Sisters Avenue, the mansion blocks, the newer flats near Queenstown Road, and the estates on the Battersea side. Anywhere with an SW11 address and a check-out date.

What if my agent fails the check-out?

We carry a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the clerk flags anything inside our scope within 48 hours, we come back and redo it at no charge, as long as you tell us in that window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate across the Wandsworth book is 97%, so it is rare, usually a missed cooker hood screw or a spot a torch caught on a window.

Do you handle limescale on the shower screens and taps?

Yes, and it is half the bathroom on this street. Thames Water for SW11 runs at around 300 mg per litre of calcium carbonate, well into the very-hard band, so screens cloud, taps spot and kettles fur in months. We descale all of it, keeping off the harshest descalers where the fittings are older chrome, because a pitted tap is a bigger deduction than the scale.

Will you clean inside the oven?

Yes, as part of the end-of-tenancy job. We take the door off where it comes off, soak the racks, de-carbonise the glass, degrease the side panels and clear the fan housing. A 90cm range takes longer and carries a £114 add-on, a double oven is £110, a single £77.

Does the new Wandsworth licensing affect my move-out?

Not the cleaning cost or scope. Borough-wide additional HMO licensing came in on 1 July 2025 for flats shared by three or four people, on top of mandatory HMO licensing for five or more, and many flats on this street fall under it. Lavender Hill sits in the Shaftesbury and Queenstown ward, which is not in either of the council’s selective schemes. It matters only in that an unlicensed landlord weakens their position in a deposit dispute.

Do I need to be there?

No. Most Lavender Hill clients leave a key, use a key safe, or have the agent let us in. The flat does need to be empty of belongings, because we clean an empty property to inventory standard and we do not move furniture on an end-of-tenancy job.

How long does it take?

A studio above the shops is usually about three hours with two cleaners. A two-bed conversion or sharer flat is five to six. A three-bed maisonette off the hill is six to seven. We give you a finish time when we quote.

Is the price fixed, or could it change on the day?

Fixed on quote, with one exception. If we arrive and the flat is in materially worse shape than described, hoarder-level clutter or a hidden leak, we phone you before doing extra hours. We do not surprise-bill anyone on completion.

What if the deductions go to a dispute?

The three approved schemes all run free adjudication. You upload the check-in and check-out reports plus your evidence, our invoice and the dated photos among it, and an adjudicator decides. A tenant with a full professional-clean paper trail rarely loses. Shelter’s tenancy-deposit guidance and the gov.uk deposit protection guide both walk through the steps.

Do you work weekends?

Saturdays at the same price. Sundays carry a £30 surcharge because we run a smaller team that day. Bank holidays are by arrangement.

What is the most common reason a clean here gets a recall?

The cooker hood filter housing. We carry common screws, but if one rolled under the unit during a fit years ago, a clerk shining a torch up the housing will flag it. Second most common is the silicone seal behind the kitchen sink in the older flats, where the mould bloom is sometimes past a surface clean, so we flag it on the quote rather than pretend it will come back to white.

Do you bring your own cleaning materials?

Yes. Hot water, descaler, degreaser, steam, mops, vacuums and cloths, all on the van. The flat needs nothing beyond electricity and, for some methods, hot water at the tap.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, bed count, check-out date and any known problem areas, that is the lot. Out of hours, email [email protected] and someone rings you back first thing. A couple of photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen the quote. And if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.