End of tenancy cleaning in Maltby Street, from £156

On a Maltby Street move-out the inventory clerk looks up before they look anywhere else. Beam tops, the exposed brick course, the soft grey dust sitting along the ductwork that runs across most of these converted-warehouse ceilings: that is the bit a quick clean skips, and on a loft flat off the Ropewalk it is the bit worth a few hundred pounds of your deposit. I run Monster Cleaning Ltd, a London end-of-tenancy firm working since 2014, and we clean these Bermondsey warehouse flats to the check-out report, at £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover Maltby Street and the Bermondsey rail-viaduct streets around it: SE1 as the core, here at SE1 3PA, plus the SE16 stretch east towards the Dickens Estate. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Southwark.

A Ropewalk loft, and the line that nearly cost a deposit

Start with a real one, because it shows the whole pattern in one flat.

“I had a converted warehouse loft just off the Ropewalk for two years, one room knocked through with exposed brick on one wall and a run of big steel-framed windows on the other. I cleaned it for a full weekend before the check-out and thought I had nailed it. The clerk found grey dust along the top of the beams and a haze on the glass I could not even see, and started writing. I called Monster in a panic. Two cleaners came on the Thursday, took the brick and the ductwork down first, then the windows, and handed it back with not a single line against the cleaning. Deposit returned in full a fortnight later.”
Daniel, Maltby Street SE1, March 2026

Two things in that account matter more than the rest. The dust he could not see, and the haze on the glass he could not see either. Both are invisible from where a tenant stands and obvious to a clerk with a torch and the afternoon light. Daniel had done the visible flat well. He lost on the parts that only a warehouse conversion has, and that is the job on Maltby Street in a sentence.

What turned it was the order of work, not extra hours. Bring the overhead grime down before the glass, or you wet the windows and the masonry dust settles straight back onto them. Most rescue jobs we get called to off the Ropewalk failed on exactly that sequence.

Why the clerk looks up first in a warehouse flat

Most deposit disputes around here are not about a tenant wrecking a flat. They are about the gap between how a tenant cleans and what an inventory clerk grades against. The clerk holds the original check-in report, walks the flat in good light, and compares it line by line. They do not give the benefit of the doubt, because that is not the job they are paid for. On a warehouse conversion that gap is wide, since the things that age fastest here are the things a tenant never thinks to clean.

Exposed brick and bare concrete shed a fine grit that drifts onto every flat surface and, worse, onto the beam tops and duct runs nobody dusts between tenants. The clerk knows this stock. They run a finger along the top of a beam, they look at the steel-framed glass edge-on against the window, and they note what they find. The period and ex-council stock around the edges fails the other way: tired kitchen grout, picture-rail dust, paint scuffs on skirting. The flat type changes the job. The standard the clerk holds you to does not move an inch.

Here is the part most tenants get wrong. You are not measured against a clean flat in the abstract. You are measured against the check-in report’s own photographs of this flat on the day you took the keys, when it had just been professionally turned over. That is the whole reason we clean to the 57-point agent-approved checklist rather than to a general idea of tidy, and it is why we hold a 97% first-time pass rate and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits over the years. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and a good number of them cover this corner of SE1.

We clean to the report.

Two laws sit under all of this and pull in opposite directions. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means a Southwark landlord cannot write professional cleaning into your contract as a condition, so nobody can force you to book us. Damp and mould, on the other hand, are a landlord obligation, not a tenant cleaning failure, so where we find damp in a cold brick corner of a loft we photograph it and flag it, so the charge lands where it belongs rather than on you.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every Maltby Street booking runs to a 57-point checklist built over a decade of local check-outs. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it first. The shape of it is below.

The kitchen, where the grading really happens

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks go into a soaking tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals are all done. That film between the glass is the single most-flagged oven fault in SE1 check-outs. If the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it on its own. After the oven, the rest of the room: hob and burners off and washed, the induction tops in the new conversions and the gas hobs in the older flats each handled their own way. The extractor is degreased inside and out and the filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard inside and out, including the deep corner units. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under them are done, then put back. The washing machine drum, the detergent drawer scrubbed, and the door seal, which is a line item clerks open every time. Microwave inside, out and underneath. Sink, taps, drainer and the metal splashback descaled, because this hard supply never spares them. Tiles and grout scrubbed. Bins emptied and washed. Floor hoovered and mopped.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, showerhead, screen and tiles first. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is plainly past saving. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, the base, the cistern, the hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
• Shower screen both sides, the tracks and the sealant bead included
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, the overflow and the plughole
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they come away from the wall
• Extractor vent wiped and the sealant cleaned to a usable state, because re-sealing is a handyman job and not a cleaning one
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin

Bedrooms, living space and the overhead work

This is where a warehouse flat is won or lost. We take the exposed masonry, the beam tops, the duct runs and any high industrial light fittings down first, so the dust does not resettle on a finished surface. Then inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, door frames, doors, handles, switches, sockets and the entryphone. Window sills, reveals and the metal frames on the inside. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and genuine scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Hard floors washed with the right product for the surface, whether that is engineered board, the original boards in a terrace, or the polished concrete a lot of these lofts are finished in. Two jobs often want their own pass: professional hot-water extraction where a tenancy writes carpet in as a hard requirement, which the carpet cleaning add-on covers on the same visit, and hard-used sofas in shared lets that need full upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover. Then a final walk-through, photographed before and after, every room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

You are measured against the check-in report’s own photographs of this flat on the day you took the keys.

What hard Thames water does to a wall of warehouse glass

Bermondsey sits in London’s hard-water belt. Thames Water states plainly that every part of its region is hard, and on the big steel-framed windows these flats are sold on that one fact loses more deposits than almost anything except the oven. Calcium dries to a cloudy film on the glass that no ordinary spray shifts, and a wall of original Crittall-style windows is exactly the feature people pay the premium for. The clerk pulls the blind, looks at the pane edge-on against the daylight, and the haze that was invisible an hour ago is suddenly the headline of the report. We take it back with a scaling solution and a blade where it has bonded, then finish the glass clear, and we do the overhead brick dust first so we are not wetting glass that grit will only settle on again.

Scale on the metalwork is the quieter version of the same problem. Taps, the showerhead, the kitchen splashback: the mineral builds faster than tenants expect and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. Where a fitting is genuinely pitted rather than dirty, we photograph the state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in. That dated photograph has settled more arguments than any amount of talking.

Specialist surfaces sit outside the scrub-and-go work. Original boards in a Bermondsey Street terrace, engineered board in a new loft, the polished concrete in an arch-adjacent unit: each takes its own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for. Exterior glass too high to reach safely from inside is a separate job, folded into the same visit when the inventory asks for it.

Southwark licensing, and why a licensed flat grades harder

If you have been renting around the Ropewalk, your building may well sit under a Southwark licence, and that changes how hard the hand-back is checked. The council’s second selective licensing scheme started on 1 November 2023 and runs for five years. The London Bridge & West Bermondsey ward, which is the ward Maltby Street falls in, is one of the wards it covers, so most privately rented homes let to a single household or two unrelated sharers in this area now need a selective licence. On top of that, Southwark runs a borough-wide additional licence for many shared houses, brought in the year before. Southwark publishes the rules and the ward list at southwark.gov.uk.

Why it matters to a clean. A licensed property is inspected more often, and the landlord has the licence record to protect, so the cleaning standard at hand-back tends to be held tighter than on an unlicensed let. In a shared conversion the communal kitchen and bathroom take most of the grading weight, and a single tenant leaving one room is still judged on the rooms they shared. So we clean the full hand-back scope, the shared kitchen and bathroom included, because that is what the licence inspection and the deposit both turn on.

What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it did not

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 periodic one, so a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The Tenant Fees Act still applies, the check-in benchmark still applies, and a deduction still has to be evidenced. What changed is timing, and timing bites in a high-churn pocket like this one. More flats leaving on rolling notice means the month-end pile-up gets less predictable, so the slot you want goes earlier than it used to.

Bermondsey block by block, from the arches to the estates

Maltby Street runs off Tanner Street and along the old rope-walk, named after the 18th-century Bermondsey ropewalk it sits on, down towards Millstream Road. The whole pocket grew out of the borough’s leather and food trade, the Tanners of Bermondsey going back to 1703, the tanneries and food warehouses that have since become loft flats. The stock changes street by street, so we work it that way rather than treating every SE1 flat the same.

The arches: the Ropewalk, Druid Street and the Spa Terminus side

This is the heart of it. The Maltby Street Market traders fill the Ropewalk arches Thursday to Sunday, the Spa Terminus wholesalers run the arches off Dockley Road in the week, and the Bermondsey Beer Mile threads the viaduct along Druid Street and Enid Street. The flats here are the warehouse and live/work conversions: exposed brick, mezzanines, the wall of steel windows, polished concrete or engineered floors. They are the trickiest for the overhead dust and the glass, and where most of the work on this page is aimed. Pick your patch: Bermondsey, Shad Thames, Bermondsey Street, London Bridge. Most of these rounds sit a short walk from Bermondsey station on the Jubilee line, with London Bridge and the Shard north and Tower Bridge west.

The conservation streets near Bermondsey Street

West of the arches the stock turns older. The Bermondsey Street conservation area has Georgian and early-Victorian terraces and period conversions, with the wine bars, bakeries and the White Cube end of the street nearby. These flats grade on period detail rather than industrial dust: original skirting and architraves, picture rails that hold years of dust, tired grout in an old kitchen. We do the detail by hand and keep anything aggressive away from original paint and plaster.

The estates over towards SE16

Walk east and you reach solid ex-local-authority stock, the Dickens Estate and the Wilson Grove cottages among it, sitting in SE16 just over the postcode line. These are post-war flats where the kitchen and bathroom carry the grading weight and carpet is far more common than in the lofts. Different building, same checklist.

Bermondsey boundaries get blurry and people guess wrong. Maltby Street is SE1, the Beer Mile straddles SE1 and SE16, the estates east are SE16. Not sure which side you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds.

What it costs, against what is sitting in the deposit scheme

Maltby Street runs at our standard London pricing: £30 per hour per cleaner, with kit, products and travel inside the area included. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet, a smoker’s flat, or a loft that has not had a deep clean in three or four years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after the fact. No surprise lines on the invoice.

Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect a deposit measured in thousands is not really a decision, and Southwark rents being what they are, the deposit usually is in the thousands. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Our pass rate across these jobs sits near 97%, but the guarantee is the real point, because a failed check-out is an expensive thing to shrug off. There is a reason the agents around here know us.

Booking it, and the month-end squeeze

This is a high-churn pocket, full of short professional and creative-industry lets, and almost every check-out lands on the last two or three days of the month. The slots go. People who ring on the 29th for the 31st are often out of luck. Book early for those windows. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected]. Price in about three minutes. Give us the postcode, flat size, check-out date and any known problem areas, and mention anything the check-in report marked “new” or “as new”.
2. We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow 7 to 10 days for an end-of-month slot, 3 to 5 days mid-month.
3. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared. We also handle removals if you want the move and the clean on one booking, which helps on these tight viaduct streets where several van trips turn into a problem.
4. Photo proof at the end. Every room, before and after, with an itemised invoice on company-headed paper. That is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct.
5. Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.

One honest note on access. The viaduct streets are narrow, loading is awkward on market days when the Ropewalk and Spa Terminus are busy, and a lot of the lofts are upper-floor units with one lift or none. Tell us the arrangement when you book, the loading, the parking and how we get in, and we plan the day around it.

Add-ons, the jobs people confuse, and the areas next door

A Maltby Street move-out often pulls in more than the core clean. Oven cleaning is in every end-of-tenancy job as standard, and also stands alone from £77 if that is all the agent flagged. Carpet cleaning matters mostly on the SE16 estates and the older terraces rather than the lofts. Window cleaning handles the big warehouse panes inside and out where access is safe. Removals puts the move and the clean on one booking.

Three different jobs get muddled here, and it pays to book the right one.

Check-in inventory report

The document the clerk wrote 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 generic idea of “clean”.

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 guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, with no formal standard to hit, from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £22 an hour on a weekly visit.

We work the areas around Maltby Street too, which matters when a tenancy straddles a boundary or your next flat is one street over: End of Tenancy Cleaning Bermondsey, End of Tenancy Cleaning Shad Thames, End of Tenancy Cleaning London Bridge, End of Tenancy Cleaning Bermondsey Street.

Questions we get asked

How much is an end of tenancy clean off Maltby Street?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Part jobs and odd-shaped units are £30 per hour per cleaner. Most warehouse-loft flats around the Ropewalk are studios or one and two-beds, so the usual spend lands between £156 and £243. We fix the figure before we start and it does not move.

Do you clean the exposed brick, beams and ductwork in a warehouse conversion?

Yes, and it is the first thing we do, not the last. We bring the dust off the masonry, the beam tops and the duct runs before anyone touches a floor, so the grit does not drift back onto a finished surface. On a Maltby Street loft that overhead grime loses the most deposits, because the tenant cannot see it from standing height and the clerk checks it with a torch.

Can you get the hard-water film off the big industrial windows?

Yes. Bermondsey sits on a hard Thames Water supply and that cloudy mineral haze does not lift with ordinary glass spray. We work it back with a scaling solution and a blade where it has bonded to the pane, then finish the glass clear against the light, which is how the clerk checks it. We do the masonry dust first and the glass after, never the other way round.

What is the 57-point agent-approved checklist?

It is the room-by-room scope we clean to, built over a decade of SE1 check-outs and tuned to what the inventory clerks here actually flag. It runs through every surface the check-out report scores, in the order a clerk works, which is a large part of why our first-time pass rate sits at 97%.

What does the 48-hour re-clean guarantee cover?

If your agent or inventory clerk marks anything down within 48 hours of our clean, we come back and put it right at no extra cost, provided you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in yet. It covers the whole checklist, the windows and the overhead dust included.

Is my flat near the Ropewalk inside Southwark’s selective licensing scheme?

Quite possibly. Southwark’s second selective licensing scheme started on 1 November 2023 for five years, and the London Bridge & West Bermondsey ward that Maltby Street sits in is one of the wards it covers, so most privately rented homes let to a single household or two sharers there now need a licence. A licensed building tends to be inspected harder at hand-back, which matters for how the clean is graded.

Do you cover shared HMO warehouse flats off Maltby Street?

Yes. If you are leaving one room in a licensed shared conversion, the clerk still grades you on the communal kitchen and bathroom as well as your bedroom. We clean the full hand-back scope, because in a licensed HMO the shared rooms carry most of the weight.

Should I book the clean before or after the removals?

After, wherever you can manage it. An empty flat grades far better, and the clerk can see the floors, the corners and the gaps behind appliances that a flat full of boxes hides. If the van runs late we can work around what is left, but empty is always the stronger position.

Do I need to be there during the clean?

No. Most clients around Maltby Street leave a key or set up access through the agent. We send photographs and the signed checklist when we finish, so you have a dated record for the deposit return whether or not you were in the flat.

Is carpet cleaning included in the price?

No, it is a separate add-on, and on this stretch it is mostly relevant to the older terraces and the ex-council flats over towards SE16 rather than the loft conversions, which tend to have wood or polished concrete floors. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed on the same visit.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 mean I can skip the end of tenancy clean?

No. The Act, live since 1 May 2026, ended Section 21 and turned assured shorthold tenancies periodic, so notice and timing changed. The standard you hand the flat back in did not. A deduction still has to be evidenced and proportionate, so a dated professional clean record still protects you.

How do I book, and how fast do you reply?

Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the flat size, the postcode and your move-out date. We confirm a fixed price against the 57-point agent-approved checklist and a slot, usually the same day for an SE1 booking. A couple of photos of the kitchen and the windows sharpens the quote.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, flat size, check-out date, any known problem areas, that is the lot. Out of hours, send us a message and someone calls you back first thing. A couple of photos of the kitchen and the windows sharpen the quote, which helps most on the bigger loft conversions. And if your Maltby Street check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Maltby Street

Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Maltby Street, oven cleaning in Maltby Street and domestic cleaning in Maltby Street.