End of tenancy cleaning in Lewisham

Towers, Loampit Vale and the park houses

Lewisham is still cheaper to rent than London as a whole. The ONS put the borough’s average private rent at £1,829 a month in August 2026, 2.0% up on a year before, against £2,332 for London; a one-bed averaged £1,457 and a two-bed £1,789. At the 2021 census 27.2% of Lewisham households rented privately, up from 24.3% in 2011.

Lewisham Gateway. The towers on the old roundabout site by the station are run by Get Living, with Muse as developer. Phase one has 362 homes in two buildings. Phase two adds 649 more: 424 at market rent, 106 affordable and 119 co-living studios, in blocks that go up to 30 storeys.

The scheme took out the northern roundabout and made Confluence Place, a small park where the Ravensbourne and the Quaggy meet. A Gateway check-out follows the operator’s own standard, so send us its check-out list and say which building and floor you are on.

Loampit Vale. West of the station, Barratt’s Renaissance development put 788 homes on the former Sundermead Estate, in buildings from five to 24 storeys, along with the Glass Mill Leisure Centre. Up to 186 of those homes are affordable housing. In a tower flat the clerk checks the inside of the glass and the track of any balcony door.

The shopping centre. In October 2025 the council approved Landsec’s plan to rebuild Lewisham Shopping Centre over about ten years, with around 1,700 homes, most of them for renters, plus 630 student and co-living units. The centre stays open while it is built, and those homes are some years off.

The park houses. Just south of the town centre, on the east side of the High Street, the Lewisham Park conservation area (designated in 2019) has eight pairs of three-storey Victorian semis from the 1880s, in yellow stock brick with tall projecting bays and timber sash windows, and Edwardian red-brick houses finished by 1906.

The council’s appraisal notes that the Victorian houses have been split into flats, while most Edwardian ones are still family homes, and that post-war council blocks from 1955 to 1981 line other sides of the park. University Hospital Lewisham, open since 1894, is on the High Street opposite.

A top-floor flat in one of those semis means three flights of stairs for the kit and sash windows to clean from the inside, so mention the floor when you book. Further up Belmont Hill towards Blackheath, the Belmont conservation area has houses built in 1907 to 1909 to designs by Reginald Fry.

The clean, in very hard water

Thames Water supplies SE13, and published readings put the water at 277 mg/l of calcium carbonate, which counts as very hard. Within a few weeks that leaves a white edge round the taps and a film on the shower glass, and clerks mark scale as dirt. Descaling is part of every Lewisham clean, at no extra charge.

• Kitchen: inside and outside every cupboard and drawer, worktops, tiles, hob, extractor hood and filter, sink and taps descaled, fridge and freezer (switched off and defrosted the night before), washing machine drawer and door seal, and the floor behind appliances that pull out.
• Bathroom: scale off taps, shower head, screen and tiles, grout scrubbed, toilet inside and out including the base, bath, basin, mirror and extractor cover.
• Every room: skirting, doors and frames, switches and sockets, radiators, window sills and glass from the inside, inside wardrobes, then floors vacuumed and washed.

In a Gateway or Loampit Vale flat the appliances are integrated, so the cleaners open each door and do the seals and inside panels. Balcony glass is cleaned from the inside. A burn mark or a chipped worktop is damage, and no clean will take it off the clerk’s report.

Clerks mark scale as dirt, so descaling is part of every Lewisham clean.