The clerk on a Leicester Square flat reaches for the extractor hood before anything else, because nine times out of ten the kitchen sits over a restaurant and the filter has taken on grease that drifted up from the unit below. That one detail shapes the whole job.
End of tenancy cleaning here has to satisfy the person writing the check-out report, so it is checklist-led, deposit-focused, priced by bedroom count, and carried with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against that report. Monster Cleaning has worked the WC2H upper-floor stock since 2014. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.
Last updated June 2026. We cover WC2H around the Square: Charing Cross Road, Lisle Street, Cranbourn Street, Bear Street, Leicester Place, St Martin’s Street and Whitcomb Street down toward the Trafalgar Square corner. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Westminster.
How the check-out report decides your deposit, and how we beat it
End of tenancy cleaning
from £174
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
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Start with the mechanism, because it is the whole game and almost nobody runs it the right way round.
- When you moved in, an inventory clerk walked the flat and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the kitchen and bathroom marked “clean to a professional standard”. Those words were true that day, because the flat had just been cleaned by people who do it for a living.
- At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares the two reports line by line.
- Anything materially worse than the move-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit.
You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a free Sunday rarely gets a WC2H tenant over the line.
The money is not abstract here. One-bed deposits in this postcode sit around £1,500 to £2,200, because the rents are high, and the clerks who work the West End are paid to find faults rather than wave you through.
On the Leicester Square jobs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a pattern:
- the hood filter
- scale on the bathroom fittings
- the oven door glass
- grout in a shared-stack bathroom
- the gap behind the cooker
- picture-rail dust in a room with tall ceilings
Each one is a line on the report. Put a few of those against a £2,000 deposit and the sum makes itself.
So we clean to the report, not to a vague idea of tidy.
- The team photographs the starting state.
- We work the 57-point list.
- We photograph the finish.
- We email you the file with the invoice on company-headed paper.
That dated photo set is your evidence if the clerk pushes back, and a tenant with a complete paper trail very rarely loses the conversation.
The 57-point clean, room by room, and why agents sign it off
Every Leicester Square booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of West End check-outs and tuned to what these clerks actually flag. It is the same scope our 300+ letting agents accept across London, applied to the WC2H stock. The full list comes with the job. Here is the shape of it.
The kitchen, where most of the deposit is won or lost
The oven, if you add it (from £31), is cleaned, not wiped: racks soaked, then the interior, fan, element and seals by hand, and the brown film between the panes where the door can be split. Then the rest of the room:
- The hob lifts and the trim underneath is degreased.
- The extractor hood gets it inside and out, and the filter is soaked or swapped. That matters more here than almost anywhere, because so many of these flats sit over a working kitchen and the filter has been catching grease from below for years.
- Every cupboard, inside and out, including the high ones above the fridge that clerks love to open.
- Fridge and freezer cleaned through once defrosted, door seal pulled out and brushed.
- The cooker is pulled forward so the gap behind, the part a clerk shines a torch into, is cleared and the floor under it mopped.
- Sink, taps and drainer descaled, tiles and grout scrubbed, bin washed.
Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong
Limescale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles with a descaler and a small brush, not a sponge. Bath sealant is checked, and where it has gone black at the wall joint we bleach it or quote to replace it before touching it.
- Toilet done properly: pan, under the rim, base, cistern and the hinges.
- Shower screen both sides, tracks included.
- Extractor grille off and the dust cleared from the housing, which is a common flag in the poorly ventilated stair-access flats around here.
- Mirror and glass polished streak-free.
- Floor mopped last into the corners.
Bedrooms, living rooms and the rest
- Skirting wiped the full length of every wall.
- The picture rail dusted, because WC2H ceilings sit high and the rail is where years of dust settle between cleans.
- Window frames, sills and reveals on the inside, glass on the inside and the outside where it is safe and the building permits.
- Light fittings, switches and sockets.
- Wardrobes and built-in cupboards emptied of dust and stray hangers, doors and runners wiped.
- Radiators front, back and the top fins.
- Internal doors both sides, including the top edge, with handles and hinges.
- Carpet vacuumed end to end with the edges done; if it needs shampoo we quote that as an add-on.
- Where a split-level flat above a shop has its own internal stair, the runner gets the same treatment.
We clean to the report, not to a vague idea of tidy.
What 1 May 2026 and Westminster licensing changed for move-outs
Two things have moved the ground under West End lettings, and it is worth being precise about both because the headlines tend to muddle them.
The national change
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026.
- Section 21
- No-fault evictions are gone.
- Existing tenancies
- Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one.
- Notice
- A tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to run out.
- The cleaning
- The part people get wrong: it did not change at all. The check-in benchmark still applies, the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before, and your obligation at hand-back is the same.
What changed is timing, and in a high-churn postcode like this one that means move-outs land more often and less predictably, so the slot you want goes sooner.
The local change
The streets around Leicester Square sit in Westminster’s West End ward, which the council brought into its selective licensing scheme on 24 November 2025, on top of the mandatory HMO licensing that already applies to larger shared houses across the borough. In plain terms, most privately rented flats here now need the landlord to hold a licence.
That is the landlord’s paperwork rather than yours, but it tightens how a tenancy is run and how a check-out is documented, which is one more reason the dated photo set earns its keep.
Westminster publishes its licensing guidance online.
If a deduction ends in dispute it goes to whichever scheme holds the deposit, and the adjudicators read the two reports side by side.
- You can read the government’s guide to the Renters’ Rights Act for the detail.
- Shelter’s tenancy-deposit guidance walks through a dispute step by step.
Above the bustle: the Theatreland flats and the grease from below
Leicester Square is the heart of Theatreland, and that is the hook for the cleaning too. The residential element is small but high-churn:
- upper-floor and above-shop flats woven through the commercial core
- a few period and mansion blocks
They are often let to professionals, to company tenants, or as a pied-a-terre. Two things make these flats clean differently from a standard London let.
First, the grease from below
Almost every unit sits above a restaurant, a cafe or a shop. Cooking smoke and aerosolised grease travel up through service stacks and shared stairwells and settle on the inside surfaces before a tenant has cooked a thing:
- the hood filter
- the hob trim
- the kitchen ceiling line
- the tops of the cupboard doors
We deal with that head on, and we are honest when a filter is genuinely past saving rather than charging you to scrub something that needs replacing.
Second, the hours
Theatre and cinema shift patterns put tenants in the flat at odd hours, which is why Sunday and Monday mornings are the easiest slots to book and Saturday afternoons are the hardest.
What Thames Water does to a West End bathroom
WC2H runs on Thames Water, which is hard.
- The reading
- Around the centre it sits near 250 milligrams a litre of calcium carbonate, toward the softer end of the Thames range but still well inside the hard band, off the chalk and limestone the supply runs through.
- Your postcode
- You can check it by postcode on thameswater.co.uk.
Calcium builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk knows this.
- They run a thumbnail down the tap.
- They look at the screen edge-on against the light.
- They pull the shower head in close.
So we descale properly rather than sponge. In the older above-shop bathrooms the fittings are sometimes original chrome, which rules out the brute-force descalers a newer flat would shrug off, so it is patience and a small brush.
Grout is the other one: kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a deduction here more often than carpets are. We scrub it back as far as honest effort takes it.
Where it is clearly past saving in a long tenancy we photograph the state before we start, so a clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already in the check-in pictures. That photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.
Around the Square: the stock street by street
The patch is compact, but the stock is not uniform, and the clerk is told to look for different things depending on the building. We work the whole of WC2H around the Square and the frontages running off it.
- The Square itself
- Upper floors and residential frontages set among the cinemas, with the Shakespeare fountain and the film-premiere lawn at the centre. Tall rooms, high-level dust, and glass that catches the light.
- Charing Cross Road
- Upper-floor studios and one-beds above the bookshops, music shops and ticket outlets between Cambridge Circus and the Square, often reached by a narrow shared stair.
- Lisle Street and Gerrard Street
- Above-shop splits over the Chinatown restaurants and grocers, where the extractor work and the picture-rail dust are the first things checked.
- Cranbourn Street and Bear Street
- A mix of older above-retail flats and later fit-outs with integrated appliances, running between the Square and Long Acre.
- Leicester Place, St Martin’s Street and Whitcomb Street
- Smaller upper-floor flats and period stock above retail, down toward the Trafalgar Square boundary.
This is the Theatreland core, distinct from Covent Garden east of Charing Cross Road, Soho to the north and Trafalgar Square to the south. If the address sits between Cambridge Circus, the Hippodrome and the lawn at the centre of the Square, we cover it.
We also run regular jobs in the rest of the borough. The closest neighbours are:
- Soho to the north
- Covent Garden to the east
- Mayfair west of Piccadilly Circus
The full borough list is on the Westminster directory linked at the top of this page.
What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until it is too late
The price follows the room count and the add-ons, and the room counts here are mostly small, so most bookings land at the lower tiers.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio (most WC2H lets) | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £174 |
| 1-bed flat | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £225 |
| 2-bed flat or split over a shop | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £261 |
| 3-bed conversion over two floors | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £357 |
| 4-bed | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £443 |
| Carpet shampoo add-on | Same visit | From £29 a room |
| Oven, on its own | 1.5-2 hours | From £95 |
- Part of the flat
- If you only need part of the flat done, say the kitchen and bathroom because the previous tenants handled the rest, it is £30 per hour per cleaner, with kit and products included.
Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. These cost more, and we say so on the phone rather than after, so there are no surprise lines on the invoice:
- a long let with heavy wear
- a smoker’s flat
- somewhere that has not had a deep clean in years
Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £225 to protect a deposit around £2,000 is not really a decision.
Most WC2H bookings are studios and one-beds; two-bed splits on Lisle Street and Cranbourn Street are common, and a genuine three-bed is usually a period conversion over two upper floors.
There is a reason West End agents keep our number: we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
Three jobs get muddled, and it pays to book the right one.
- 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.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, against the letting-agent benchmark, with the flat empty and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it, at a fixed price by bedroom count.
- Deep clean
- A reset of a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, from £204: two cleaners for at least three hours, kit included.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing maintenance, from £23 an hour on a weekly visit.
Booking it, keys and the hand-back
Booking is quick. Here is how it runs.
- Ring 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com. Give us the address, the room count, the move-out date, and whether the inventory walk is booked yet.
- We quote on the call. Carpet shampoo, oven and any extras come as one all-in figure, not a string of surprises.
- We hold a slot. Most WC2H jobs go in the day after the booking call; Sunday and Monday mornings are the freest.
- The team arrives with everything: vacuums, mops, the oven products, the descaler for the hard water, glass cleaner, the lot. No buying detergent on the way.
- You or the clerk get a finished flat that meets the 57-point checklist, with before-and-after photos if you ask.
Keys are rarely a problem here. So many Leicester Square flats are company or pied-a-terre lets that key collection from the agent is routine, and we can let ourselves in and lock up after.
- Payment
- Card or bank transfer, your choice.
- Short notice
- If your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Leicester Square?
A studio is £174, a one-bed £225, a two-bed £261, a three-bed £357 and a four-bed £443. Most WC2H flats are studios and one-beds, so the lower tiers are what we quote most. Carpet shampoo runs from £29 a bedroom and ovens from £31.
Do you cover flats above the restaurants and shops on Charing Cross Road and Lisle Street?
Yes, that is the bulk of our Leicester Square work. The kitchen specification covers the extractor hood and filter, the cooker trim and the cupboard tops, where cooking smoke and fryer grease from the unit below tend to settle before a tenant has cooked anything. If a hood filter has gone past cleaning we will say so on the call rather than pretend a scrub will fix it.
Is Leicester Square covered by Westminster landlord licensing?
Most of it, yes. The streets around the Square sit in Westminster’s West End ward, which the council brought into its selective licensing scheme on 24 November 2025, on top of the mandatory HMO licensing that already applies to larger shared houses across the borough. Licensing is the landlord’s paperwork, not the cleaner’s, but it means a check-out is documented more tightly than it used to be, which is exactly why a dated photo set matters.
How do you deal with limescale on the bathroom taps?
WC2H runs on Thames Water at roughly 250 milligrams a litre of calcium carbonate, toward the softer end of the Thames supply but still firmly in the hard band. We take it off taps, the shower head and the screen with a descaler and a small brush, then rinse and dry. We do not just sponge it, because sponging is what leaves the cloudy ring an inventory clerk looks for.
What is the re-clean guarantee if the inventory clerk flags something?
It is a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the clerk flags any item on the 57-point checklist within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no extra charge. The guarantee is there for the jobs where one thing needs a second look.
Do you work weekends in Leicester Square?
Yes. Sunday and Monday mornings are usually the freest slots in WC2H, because a lot of the residential stock is occupied by people working West End theatre and cinema shifts who have those mornings off. Saturday afternoons go first. Tell us the move-out date and we will find the slot that fits the inventory walk.
Do I need to be at the flat for the clean?
No. We can pick keys up from the letting agent on the day and drop them back when we finish. Plenty of Leicester Square lets are company or pied-a-terre flats where the tenant is not even in the country at hand-back, so key collection through the agent is routine. We send completion photographs if you ask for them.
How long does a one-bed Leicester Square clean take?
Three to four hours for a one-bed in normal condition. If the kitchen is carrying heavy hood grease from the unit downstairs, or the bathroom sealant needs work, it can run to five. The flat being empty when we arrive is the single biggest thing that keeps it to the lower end. We give you the realistic time on the booking call.
Can you do a quick turnaround between short stays as well as a full move-out?
Yes. We work the same 57-point checklist for a turnaround between guests as for an end-of-tenancy hand-back, with tighter slots where the gap is short. The clean itself does not change with the tenancy type, so whether the flat is a long company let or a permitted short stay, the standard the clerk checks against is the same.
Do you do oven cleaning as a separate booking?
We do. It is £95 for a single oven, £128 for a double and £161 for a 90cm range cooker. Added to a full end-of-tenancy booking, it happens in the same visit. As a standalone, where the oven is the only thing the agent pulled you up on, it is a separate appointment. The oven cleaning page sets out the full scope.
Do you cover the upper-floor flats above the Chinatown frontages on Gerrard Street and Lisle Street?
Regularly. That stock is mostly upper-floor splits over restaurants and grocers, reached by a narrow internal stair. The extractor work, the high-level dust along the picture rail where these older rooms keep their tall ceilings, and the descale on the bathroom fittings are the items a clerk checks first in those flats.
What deposits have you helped tenants get back from West End lets?
Across the company since 2014 we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits. WC2H deposits sit high because the rents do, with one-bed deposits often in the £1,500 to £2,200 range, so a clean that gets the inventory signed off with no deduction is real money back in the tenant’s account rather than the landlord’s.
How do I book a Leicester Square clean?
Ring 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com with the postcode, the room count and the move-out date, and say whether the inventory walk is booked yet. We quote on the call, hold a slot, and the team turns up with all the kit. We do not take payment until you have walked the finished flat.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Leicester Square
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Leicester Square, oven cleaning in Leicester Square and domestic cleaning in Leicester Square.