End of tenancy cleaning in Maritime Greenwich

The inventory clerk on a Royal Hill upper flat goes to the cornice before anything else, torch angled up, looking for the grey dust shelf along the top edge of the moulding that an eleven-foot Georgian ceiling puts well out of a stepladder’s reach. That one line decides more Maritime Greenwich deposits than the oven does. We are Monster Cleaning, a Greenwich end of tenancy team working the World Heritage core since 2014, and the whole clean is built to satisfy the person who writes that report: fixed quotes, an agent-facing checkout report on request, £30 per hour per cleaner when a job is billed by the hour, and a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the checkout itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the whole SE10 town-centre core, the King William Walk and College Approach spine, Greenwich Church Street, Nelson Road and the market, up the slope through Royal Hill and Crooms Hill towards Greenwich Park, plus Park Row, Park Vista and the Creek Road river edge, with the SE10 8 and SE10 0 borders a short step further. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Greenwich.

Why a clean inside the UNESCO boundary is a different job

Maritime Greenwich is the historic town-centre heart of Greenwich, the riverside patch UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1997. The line drawn on that inscription takes in the Cutty Sark in her dry berth at the water’s edge, the Old Royal Naval College quadrangle with the Painted Hall, the Queen’s House and the National Maritime Museum across the road, then Greenwich Park climbing to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian at the top. Underneath the landmarks sits the thing that matters to a checkout: the housing, and it is old. Most flats here are carved out of Georgian and Victorian terraces and townhouses, with period cottages up Crooms Hill and later mansion flats and riverside apartments toward the Creek Road edge.

This is not the Peninsula. If your flat is a new tower by the O2 with floor-to-ceiling glass, you want our North Greenwich end of tenancy page, because the deposit mechanism there is a film on the glass against a developer photo set. Down here in the maritime core the mechanism is the opposite. You are cleaning original timber, surviving lath-and-plaster, hand-run cornice and a hundred and seventy years of paint on the joinery, and the clerk knows every one of those surfaces holds dirt a modern flat never has.

The area sits inside a conservation area with an Article 4 direction across most of it, which removes the permitted-development right to swap original windows, doors, chimneys and front walls for modern replacements. The practical effect on a hand-back is simple. The glazing you are cleaning is the same painted timber that has been in the reveal for generations, not a wipe-clean uPVC unit, and the clerk photographs the lower glazing bar against the freeholder’s schedule. A generic checklist built for a Docklands new-build fails here.

Down here the checkout is not decided on the glass. It is decided on the plaster, the joinery and the paint.

Rents follow the stock and the postcode. A one-bed period upper flat around Royal Hill or off Crooms Hill lets in the region of £1,600 to £2,000 a month, and a river-outlook two-bed toward Greenwich Reach runs higher, so the deposit under the five-week cap is often £2,000 to £2,900. Bigger deposit, longer inventory walk, more riding on the day the keys go back.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a Greenwich move-out

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every assured shorthold tenancy in England has rolled over to a periodic tenancy, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting out a fixed term.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change one bit. The checkout benchmark is the same, the deposit rules are the same, and the standard you are held to is still the professionally cleaned flat described in your check-in report. What shifted is timing. Greenwich already runs a high-churn let market, with students from the University of Greenwich campus in the Old Royal Naval College, young professionals and a steady turnover of period-conversion flats. Let people leave on a rolling notice instead of a fixed date and the move-outs spread across the calendar and get harder to predict, which means the slot you want gets booked by someone else if you wait. The dull takeaway pays for itself: ring earlier than you used to.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

Every booking here runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local checkouts and tuned to what SE10 clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job. This is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where the modern flats lose it

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak in a tank, the door glass is split so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. On the later infill flats toward Greenwich Reach and the Norman Road side, the galley layouts run the extractor tight to the ceiling and the trim line where the hood meets the cabinet underside bakes an amber grease most tenants never touch. That trim line is the single most-flagged kitchen fault on the modern stock. Then the rest of the room: hob and burners off and washed, extractor baffle soaked or swapped, every cupboard inside, outside, on top and underneath, fridge and freezer defrosted and cleaned through, dishwasher filter and seals, the washing-machine drawer and the door gasket where the hard supply leaves grey scale. Sink, taps and waste get a weak-acid soak with real dwell time, then a polish. Tiles and grout scrubbed, switches and sockets wiped, the floor mopped last once the dust has dropped.

Bathrooms, and the scale that sets into the chrome

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen runner and tiles first, with a proper soak rather than a quick spray, then a rinse and a polish. The WC gets the bowl, rim, hinge, base and the run behind the pedestal nobody looks at but the clerk. Sink, taps, overflow and plug, chrome brought back separately after the descale. Mirror, cabinet, shaver socket, extractor grille. Grout scrubbed where the shower water lands. Towel rail and the radiator behind it. Floor into the corners by hand.

Bedrooms and living rooms, where the period detail lives

• Wardrobes and drawers inside and out, runners and rails wiped, the strip of carpet under the wardrobe that always gets missed
• Skirtings and picture rails, common on the Royal Hill and Park Row upper flats
• Surviving plaster cornice brushed soft first, then microfibre on a damp-not-wet cloth, worked in three-foot sections from a tower because a stepladder cannot reach a Georgian ceiling cleanly, and the acanthus dust shelf brushed before anything else
• Original ceiling roses dusted by hand where they are still there
• Original timber window joints hand-wiped on plain water, a separate cloth for the painted profile, no cleaner sprayed onto old lead-and-oil paint
• Light fittings, switches, sockets, thermostat, internal doors both sides with hinges, handles and tops
• Carpet vacuumed in two directions and marks spot-treated, full shampoo an add-on
• Pine boards on the older flats given a damp-not-wet pass, edges hand-wiped

Throughout

Stairs, banister, spindles and the under-stair cupboard, and the Crooms Hill cottage staircases climb three storeys and show bag-rub at shoulder height. Hallway and stairwell skirtings. Inside glass on every window, frames wiped, locks dusted. Original shutter boxes where present, brushed dry and finished with microfibre, never wet. On the river-facing flats the balcony slider track holds a salt-laden dust off the water that has to be cleared. Last of all, a final walk-through with a torch in low light, because daylight hides the shelf on top of the cornice that a checkout torch finds straight away.

What Thames Water leaves on a Greenwich bathroom

SE10 is on Thames Water, and the supply here is very hard, drawn off the chalk under the Thames Valley and running to roughly 315 parts per million of calcium carbonate on the south-east London side of the network (Thames Water hard-water help). That one fact loses more Greenwich deposits than almost anything except the oven and the cornice. Calcium sets onto the chrome faster than tenants expect, a cloth does nothing to it, and the clerk checks for it deliberately: a thumbnail down the tap, the screen edge held to the light, the shower head pulled in close.

The period flats make it harder. Original or reproduction chrome and brass fittings on a Crooms Hill or Royal Hill bathroom rule out the brute-force descalers a newer flat would shrug off, so the scale has to come off with a controlled dwell and a lot of patience rather than an aggressive acid. Grout is the paired problem. Where a long tenancy has left it past saving, we photograph the state before we start, timestamped, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already grey in the check-in pictures. That single photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.

A generic kitchen spray never lifts a calcium ring off Greenwich chrome. It needs a soak, a dwell and a polish.

The stock changes as you climb from the river

The core is small enough to walk in twenty minutes, and the housing changes completely as you go. Start at the water. The band west of King William Walk, the little grid of Crane Street, Park Row and Park Vista, is mostly 1700s and early-1800s Georgian terrace, two and three storeys with semi-basements, brought right to the reclaimed river edge below the Old Royal Naval College. These flats carry the heaviest period detail we handle: run cornice, ceiling roses, shutter boxes, original boards, and the checkout on one of them lives or dies on the hand-detailing, not on anything you can rush.

Climb the slope and the character shifts. Crooms Hill is a long run of 17th, 18th and 19th-century cottages and townhouses up towards Blackheath Avenue and the park gate, several of them Grade II listed, with those tall narrow staircases that take real time. Royal Hill is a tighter street of late-Georgian and Victorian flats above a small run of shops and pubs. Around the market, Greenwich Church Street, Nelson Road, College Approach and Turnpin Lane are listed Georgian shop terrace with flats over the top, and the ground-floor commercial use puts an odd access rhythm on a move-out. Then the later stock: the infill flat blocks and mansion redevelopments toward Creek Road, Norman Road and the Greenwich Reach riverside, put up once the old wharfing came down, where the failure mode swings back to the modern one, the galley extractor and the balcony track rather than the plaster.

One era per flat needs its own method, so we do not send the same kit to every SE10 address. A Park Vista upper wants soft brushes and a tower; a Greenwich Reach two-bed wants a degreaser and a dwell on the hood trim. Book the wider net too if you need it: Deptford High Street end of tenancy just across the creek, and Lewisham Central end of tenancy a little further out, both sit at the same standard London tier as here.

Not sure which side of a boundary your flat sits on, or whether it counts as the maritime core or the wider town? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds. We almost certainly cover it.

Where Greenwich licensing actually bites

Licensing catches a lot of Greenwich landlords out, and the detail matters if a shared let is involved, because a council enforcement file gets quoted back in a later deposit dispute. Two schemes run in the Royal Borough. The selective licensing scheme, which covers ordinary single-household private lets, applies only in named parts of Plumstead, Glyndon, Shooters Hill, Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside. The maritime core sits in Greenwich West ward, with the western river edge in the small Greenwich Creekside ward that was carved out of Greenwich West at the 2022 boundary review, and neither of those is in the selective scheme. So a routine flat in the town centre does not need a selective licence.

What does apply borough-wide is HMO licensing. The Royal Borough’s additional HMO licensing scheme started on 1 January 2024 and runs for five years, to the end of 2028, and it covers smaller shared houses of three or four people sharing facilities across the whole borough, alongside the mandatory scheme under the Housing Act 2004 that bites on any HMO of five or more occupants. If your Greenwich address is a shared house rather than a single let, it very likely needs a licence, and the council keeps a register the Royal Borough of Greenwich licensing pages set out in full.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

SE10 sits at our standard London tier, so Maritime Greenwich is not priced as a premium neighbourhood. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed or a whole period house £425. Those are full fixed quotes with the 57-point agent-approved checklist applied and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee included, no VAT and no fuel surcharge, and the indoor tower for a Georgian cornice on a Royal Hill, Park Row or Crooms Hill upper flat carries no extra charge. Where a full clean would be overkill, a light top-up runs at £30 per cleaner per hour.

Add-ons are priced the same way, in plain numbers. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted area, which is worth booking where a stair-runner on a Crooms Hill cottage shows edge wear. A single oven deep clean is £77, a double £110, a 90cm range £114, though one oven is already inside the standard clean, so those figures are for a second oven or a standalone. Nothing is presented as a discount, because these are the full prices.

Now run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed at £243 to protect a deposit sitting around £2,500 is barely a decision. Most tenants only run that sum after a DIY checkout has already failed on the cornice or the scale, which is the expensive way round. Our first-time pass rate across these jobs sits near 97%, and the guarantee is the backstop: flag a cleaning issue inside 48 hours and we come back and put it right free, provided nobody has moved in and the flat is as we left it. There is a reason SE10 agents keep our number. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years the work has added up to £1.2m deposits recovered for tenants that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

It helps to keep the services straight, because the wrong booking gets spotted at the checkout.

Check-in inventory report

The document a clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos. It is the benchmark your checkout is judged against, which is exactly why we clean to it rather than to a vague idea of tidy.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, priced as a fixed quote by bedroom count, agent report on request, the 48-hour guarantee on it.

Deep clean

A deep clean for a home you are staying in, same depth, no inventory paperwork and no 48-hour clause, from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £22 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.

A Crooms Hill job from the spring

“Handed back a 2-bed on the lower Crooms Hill run after three years, a period conversion with an original staircase and a lot of cornice, let through Winkworth Greenwich. I had scrubbed for two evenings and still knew the ceilings and the shower were beyond me. Monster brought a tower for the cornice, two cleaners for most of the day, soaked the scale off the shower and the taps and did the whole staircase. The clerk walked it two days later and passed the cleaning without a deduction. Deposit back inside the week. The dated photos they left were the thing that stopped any argument.”
Priya, Crooms Hill SE10, April 2026

That is a fair picture of the pattern up here: a long tenancy, original plaster the tenant cannot reach, scale set into the chrome, and an agent who checks. The clean cost a fraction of the deposit at stake. It usually does. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the timestamped photo set that went out with the invoice, the part a DIY checkout rarely has when the agent pushes back.

Booking it around the pedestrian zone

Booking is a phone call. Tell us the postcode, the bedroom count and the move-out date, and we confirm a fixed quote on the call, talking through the carpet add-on, the oven type, the indoor tower for a period cornice, and the access quirks that come with the town centre.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected]. A couple of photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen the quote.
2. We book you in, ideally the day before the checkout with a buffer. Allow more notice for an end-of-month slot, because that is when Greenwich move-outs bunch up.
3. Flat empty when we arrive, furniture and belongings gone. We handle removals too if you want the move and the clean on one booking, which genuinely helps on the narrow streets up the hill.
4. Photo proof at the end, every room before and after, with an itemised invoice on headed paper. That is your evidence pack.
5. Checkout happens, and anything flagged inside 48 hours we come back and fix free.

One honest note on access. The market end of King William Walk is pedestrianised for much of the day, and the Cutty Sark Gardens frontage has loading restrictions tied to the cruise-call coach drops, so the morning window for a van is real and worth planning. Tell us the arrangement when you book and how we get in, whether that is a key with the agent on College Approach or Royal Hill, a key safe inside the communal door, or a concierge on the newer riverside blocks. Sorting it in advance takes the sting out of the day.

Questions we get asked

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Maritime Greenwich?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed or whole period house £425. SE10 sits at our standard London tier, so the maritime core is not priced as a premium area, the same band as Deptford and Lewisham Central. Carpet shampoo and a second oven are priced separately.

Why is a period Greenwich flat more work than a Peninsula tower?

Because the surfaces are old and original. A new flat by the O2 turns on cleaning the glass; a Georgian or Victorian flat in the town centre turns on hand-detailing run cornice, ceiling roses, original timber joinery and shutter boxes, none of which a modern flat has. The clerk checks those features individually because the inventory names them individually, so the clean has to match them individually.

How long does the clean take?

A two-bed period flat off King William Walk or Park Vista takes us six to eight hours with two to three cleaners, longer when we bring the indoor tower for a Georgian cornice. A two-bed in one of the Greenwich Reach infill flats runs four to six hours because the layout is tighter and the surfaces are modern. A studio is usually a long morning. We do not rush by the clock, we work to the checklist.

Can you reach the cornice on a Royal Hill or Crooms Hill upper flat?

Yes, we bring an indoor folding tower on every period-upper job at no extra charge. A stepladder will not safely reach a moulded cornice on an eleven-foot ceiling and a kitchen step will not get the dust shelf cleanly, so we will not pretend otherwise.

Do you handle original timber windows and Article 4 detail?

Yes. We hand-wipe original timber glazing on plain water with a separate cloth for the painted profile, and we never spray cleaner onto lead-and-oil paint that has been on the joinery for generations. If your address is inside the inscribed World Heritage boundary on Park Row, Park Vista, Crane Street, Royal Hill, King William Walk or Crooms Hill, mention it at booking and we brief the team on the listed-detail handling.

Do you guarantee my deposit back?

We cannot guarantee the deposit, because an inventory has lines we never touch, such as paint, wear and tear and the landlord’s own furniture. What we guarantee is the cleaning side: if the clerk flags any cleaning issue within 48 hours of our visit, we come back at no charge under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Our first-time pass rate is around 97%.

What about the hard-water scale on the chrome?

Thames Water runs very hard in SE10, near 315 ppm calcium carbonate off the chalk, so shower heads, screen runners, taps and kettle elements need a weak-acid soak with real dwell time and then a polish. On the period fittings we keep it gentle rather than aggressive. A generic spray will not lift the calcium ring, which is why hard-water lines fail so often at checkout.

Does my flat need a licence in Greenwich?

A normal single-household flat in the maritime core does not need a selective licence, because the selective scheme only covers named parts of Plumstead, Glyndon, Shooters Hill, Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside, not Greenwich West or Greenwich Creekside. A shared house of three or more people probably does need an HMO licence under the borough-wide additional scheme that started on 1 January 2024 and runs to the end of 2028, or the mandatory scheme for five or more occupants.

Do you handle HMO common parts?

Yes. Shared stairs, hallways, kitchens and bathrooms are cleaned as standard rooms, never at a premium. Tell us at booking that it is a licensed HMO, because the licence creates a paper trail the council can quote back and the common-parts inspection tends to run closer than it did years ago.

Do I need to be there?

No. Most clients leave a key with the letting agent on College Approach or Royal Hill, or use a key safe inside the communal door, and the newer riverside blocks have a concierge. We send a written checkout report by email when we leave.

How quickly can you book me in?

Usually 48 to 72 hours across SE10, with the SE10 8 and SE10 0 borders a similar lead time. Same-day is sometimes possible if a team is finishing a nearby Royal Hill or Greenwich Reach job, so ring the office and ask.

Do you work the King William Walk pedestrian zone and the loading restrictions?

Yes. The pedestrian-zone hours at the market end and the cruise-call coach drops around Cutty Sark Gardens set the morning access window for a van, and we schedule around them so you do not have to.