The newest postcode in London
Stand on Nine Elms Lane and look up. Where there were sidings, a cold store and the back of New Covent Garden Market, there is now a corridor of residential towers running from Vauxhall to the old power station, most of them finished in the last decade. This is one of the most heavily rebuilt patches of ground in the whole city, and almost everyone living here is renting a flat that came out of a show suite. That single fact shapes every checkout on the strip.
The landmark that everyone steers by is Battersea Power Station. Giles Gilbert Scott designed it, the brick cathedral with the four white chimneys that sat derelict for nearly forty years, and it reopened on 14 October 2022 after a long restoration by Wilkinson Eyre. Apple took the old boiler house for its UK headquarters, the turbine halls became shops and restaurants, there is a glass lift that runs up the inside of a chimney, and a few hundred flats sit in the building itself. The crews who clean down here use it as a fixed point. If a tenant says they are five minutes from the chimneys, we know roughly which blocks they mean.
Then there is the embassy. The United States moved its London mission from Grosvenor Square out to Nine Elms, opening the new building in January 2018, a pale glass cube set back behind a pond that the press christened a moat and that is, in plain terms, deep enough to stop a lorry. It pulled the centre of gravity of the whole regeneration south of the river. Around it sits Embassy Gardens, the development with the clear-bottomed swimming pool slung between two towers, and a string of other blocks along the emerging linear park that is meant one day to run the length of the strip.
The thing that made all of it work is underground. For years this corner had no tube at all, which is partly why it stayed industrial so long. The Northern line extension changed that, two new Zone 1 stations at Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station, with the first train running on 20 September 2021. The towers had a tube, the lettings market caught fire, and the churn of tenants going in and out stepped up a gear.
So Nine Elms is, more than almost anywhere we work, a place of brand-new flats let furnished, taken on by people who often are not staying long. Corporate tenants on a year. Overseas families on a school cycle. Sharers splitting a two-bed because the rent alone is brutal. That is the housing, and an end of tenancy clean here has to suit it.
A strip on two councils
Here is a wrinkle that catches tenants out, and I would rather be honest about it than tidy. Nine Elms straddles a borough boundary. Most of it, including the SW8 4DB end and the bulk of the new towers, sits in Wandsworth, in the Nine Elms ward that was carved out of the old Queenstown ward for the 2022 elections. But the eastern fringe, the part nearest the embassy and the Nine Elms tube station, slips over into Lambeth. The river is the northern edge, with Pimlico on the far bank.
Why does a council line matter for a clean? It does not change the cleaning itself. It changes the rules your landlord has to follow, and that feeds straight into how a deposit dispute plays out. Two councils means two sets of licensing rules over a few hundred metres, and I will come back to exactly what each one requires further down, because people get this wrong and it costs them when they argue a deduction.
The postcodes blur too. Most of the strip is SW8, the tail towards the power station tips into SW11, and the lettings particulars cheerfully mix the two. None of that bothers us. We cover the lot, both sides of the boundary, to the same checklist and guarantee. When you book, tell us the block name and the postcode, because that is how we know which side of the line you are on.
New Covent Garden Market sits in the middle of all this, the biggest wholesale fruit, vegetable and flower market in the country, on the same fifty-odd acres it has held since the 1970s and now being rebuilt around the new homes. It is worth knowing for one practical reason. The market works through the night and the lorries run early, so the roads round it are busy at hours when the rest of London is asleep, which matters when we plan what time a van can reach a tower on the market side of the strip.
Why a brand-new flat still fails a checkout
People assume a new flat is easy. It is not.
A new-build checkout is unforgiving in a way an old flat never is, because the inventory was taken when the place was pristine and the clerk measures you against that. There is no patina to hide behind, no honest wear that softens the comparison. Every mark you leave shows against a baseline of showroom-perfect, so the bar is higher here than in a tired Victorian conversion, not lower. That surprises people, and it is the single most common reason a Nine Elms deposit takes a hit.
The glass is the first thing. These flats are built with floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors onto a balcony, and a clerk sees every smear when the low sun comes off the river in the afternoon. We clean the inside of the glass properly and the frames and the tracks, where grit collects and a quick wipe never reaches. The outside of the high panels is a separate job, done from inside where we safely can, or flagged for the building if it needs a cradle.
Then the cooling and heating, which is where new flats hide their dirt. Most of these blocks run comfort cooling or air conditioning rather than radiators, and the vents and grilles fur up with dust that you never notice until a clerk runs a finger along a blade. Underfloor heating means there is often no radiator to check, but there are manifolds, trickle vents and extractor grilles instead, and all of them get looked at. We clean what the inventory lists, and on these flats the inventory lists the bits people forget.
Kitchens in the towers are usually open-plan and fitted with integrated appliances, which means the oven, the induction hob, the extractor hood and the dishwasher are built in and have to come up like new. The oven is the usual culprit. It looks clean from the front and is baked hard inside, and an integrated oven cannot just be swapped out, so it has to be stripped and cleaned in place. Handleless units with a push-catch finish mark easily and show every fingerprint, so we do the fronts as carefully as the insides.
Wet rooms and en-suites are the other deposit drain. London water is hard, Wandsworth is no exception, and a glass shower screen clouds with limescale within weeks. We strip the scale with proper acid-based products rather than a hopeful spray, clean the grout and the silicone back to a colour, and do the chrome, the extractor and the loo properly rather than giving them a wipe. On a furnished flat the soft furnishings come into it as well, so the sofa, the mattress protectors and the dressed bed all need to go back as the inventory found them.
Balconies catch people out last. Nearly every flat here has one, the inventory usually covers it, and a season of London air leaves the decking grimy and the glass balustrade filthy. A clerk checks the balcony. So we clean the balcony. None of this is exotic; it is just thorough, and thorough is the entire job.
A new-build checkout is unforgiving in a way an old flat never is, because the inventory was taken when the place was pristine and the clerk measures you against that.
The 57-point clean, and what backs it
We clean to a fixed list. Every flat, the same 57-point checklist, built from the schedules that letting agents and inventory clerks on this side of the river actually use at handover. It is not a tidy-up and it is not our idea of clean. It is the document the person inspecting your flat will be holding, and working to their list rather than ours is the main reason the job passes as often as it does.
And it does pass. Our first-time pass rate sits at 97%, which on a strip of exacting managed blocks is a number we are quietly proud of. The other 3% of the time a clerk queries something, and that is what the guarantee is for. If the agent or the inventory clerk challenges the standard, we come back and put it right under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee, at no extra charge. You do not pay twice for one checkout, and you are not left hiring a contractor on top of us.
The reason we can stand behind that is the work already done. Across London we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, the people who decide whether a deposit comes back, and over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That figure is not plucked from the air for a brochure. It is the running total of money that stayed with tenants because a flat passed its checkout instead of failing it.
A word on what the list covers, since people ask. Every room, top to bottom. Kitchens get the oven inside and out, the hob, the extractor, every unit inside and out, the splashbacks, the sink and taps descaled, the floor washed into the corners. Bathrooms and wet rooms get the limescale stripped, the grout and silicone cleaned, the screen and tiles done, the extractor and chrome polished, the loo sanitised. Living areas and bedrooms get the floors, the skirting, the glass and the tracks, the vents, the doors, the switches and the cobwebs. Then the bits people forget, the utility cupboard, the manifold cupboard, the back of every door, the top of the wardrobe. The clerk checks those, so we clean those.
What we need from you is simple. The flat has to have electricity and running hot water on the day, because nobody can clean an oven or a wet room properly without either. Everything you own should be out, and the fridge-freezer defrosted and switched off. After that the flat is ours. We bring the products, the machines and the list, and we stay until the list is done, however long that takes, because the team is priced by the flat and not by the hour.
Getting a van, and a crew, into a tower
The towers are easy to reach and a nuisance to load. That is the honest summary.
Getting a crew here is the simple part now. The Northern line runs to Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station, the 436 and the 344 work along the strip, and Vauxhall is a short hop east for the Victoria line and the trains. Most of our cleaners come in by tube or bus and barely think about it, which is a recent luxury on this stretch. The van is the part that needs planning.
Parking around the new blocks is tight and heavily controlled, the bays are mostly permit or pay-by-app, and the service roads round the power station and the market can be busy or shut for an event or a delivery window with little notice. We plan loading around all of that, drop the kit, and move the van rather than blocking a resident or a loading bay. If your building has a service entrance, a loading bay or a porter, tell us when you book, because on a big managed block that single detail changes the whole day and usually makes it quicker.
Inside, these blocks run on fobs, concierge desks and goods lifts, and that is where time quietly disappears. A concierge will often need notice that a cleaning crew is coming, some buildings insist contractors use the goods lift and book a slot for it, and a few want a certificate or proof of insurance on file before they let anyone up. We are used to all of it. The smoothest checkouts are the ones where you have told the concierge we are coming, sorted the lift booking if the building needs one, and left a way for us to get in at a fixed time.
Keys and handover are usually straightforward because so many of these flats are managed. If you have already moved out and left a set with the agent or the concierge, that is fine; we collect, clean and hand back, working straight to the inventory so the agent can inspect the moment we finish. If the flat is on a high floor, which plenty are, the job is the same but the timing is not, since carrying machines and water up through a booked goods lift takes longer than walking into a house. An honest word about the floor when you book means an honest price.
Licensing on the Nine Elms strip
This is where the two-council split actually bites, so it is worth getting right. On the Wandsworth side, which is most of Nine Elms including the SW8 4DB end, the council brought in additional HMO licensing across the whole borough on 1 July 2025, running for five years. So if your flat is a house in multiple occupation, a shared home let room by room to three or more people from different households, the landlord very likely needs a licence. Mandatory HMO licensing, for the larger shared homes of five or more people, applies borough-wide as well.
Selective licensing is the part people assume covers everywhere, and on the Wandsworth side it does not reach Nine Elms. Wandsworth runs selective licensing in named wards only, Furzedown, South Balham, Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway from July 2025, with East Putney, Northcote and West Putney added from 1 April 2026. Nine Elms ward is not on either list. So an ordinary single-household private let here, the most common kind in the towers, does not need a selective licence on the Wandsworth side, though an HMO still needs its HMO licence. The council has a postcode checker that settles it in a minute, and I would use it rather than take my word for it.
The Lambeth side is different, which is the whole point of the boundary mattering. Lambeth brought in a much wider selective licensing scheme from 1 September 2025 that covers most of the borough, so a single-household private let on the Lambeth fringe of Nine Elms, the part over towards the embassy and the tube, is far more likely to need a selective licence than the same flat a few hundred metres west in Wandsworth. Lambeth also runs additional HMO licensing across the borough. Same street name, two different rulebooks.
Why labour the point on a cleaning page? Because licensing shifts the balance. When a landlord holds the right licence and follows the rules, a checkout is usually clean and businesslike; when the paperwork is shaky, deductions get used as a bargaining chip. Knowing which scheme applies to your flat tells you which questions to ask before you ever get to the clean, and an unlicensed let where a licence was required is the landlord’s problem, not yours. If you share the flat with people you are not related to, ask whether it is licensed, on whichever side of the boundary you sit.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photographs taken the day you moved in, recording the condition of every room. Your checkout is judged against this, so on a new-build it sets a very high bar.
- Schedule of dilapidations
- The list an agent or clerk draws up of anything they say falls short at checkout, cleaning included, with a cost beside each item. This is what comes out of your deposit if the flat fails.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme requiring a licence for most private lets in named wards. It does not reach Nine Elms ward on the Wandsworth side, but Lambeth runs a much wider scheme on its side of the boundary.
- HMO licence
- A separate requirement for a house in multiple occupation, a home shared by people from different households. Additional and mandatory HMO licensing apply borough-wide in both Wandsworth and Lambeth.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full, inventory-led clean of an empty flat at the close of a let, aimed at the checkout standard. Different from a deep clean, which is about a lived-in home rather than a handover.
What a clerk can and cannot charge for
There is a lot of myth around deposits, and the new-build crowd cops more of it than most, so here is the plain version.
Your deposit has to sit in a government-backed tenancy deposit protection scheme, and at the end of the tenancy a landlord can only charge for cleaning where the flat has not been returned to the standard recorded in the check-in inventory, with fair wear and tear set aside. That is the test, and it is the same on both sides of the boundary. A landlord cannot simply keep money because they would like the place cleaned again.
One point worth knowing, because agents on these blocks still slip it into contracts. A clause demanding you pay for “professional cleaning” regardless of the state you leave the flat in is an unfair term, and it is not enforceable. Shelter sets this out plainly: the standard you owe is to return the flat as clean as it was when you moved in, no more. We get asked for a cleaning receipt a lot on this strip, and we are happy to provide one, but you are buying the result, not a piece of paper an agent can wave about.
The wider law has shifted too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 reshaped a great deal about how tenancies run, but it did not change the cleaning test one bit. Leave the flat as you found it, allowing for honest wear, and there is nothing for an agent to deduct. If a deduction does land and you think it is unfair, the deposit scheme runs a free dispute service, and a clean done to the inventory with a receipt behind it is the strongest hand you can hold.
What it costs, and how to book
We price by the size of the flat, not by the hour. That matters, because an hourly clean gives a crew every reason to drag the job out and none to finish it, and a checkout is the one clean where finishing is the whole point. You get a fixed price for the property, agreed before we start, and the team stays until the 57-point list is done. On this strip that runs from a studio or one-bed at the lower end to a larger three-bed tower flat at the upper end. The rents here are high and the deposits scale with them, so the clean is almost always a fraction of what a failed checkout would cost.
To get a price, tell us the postcode, the block, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether the flat is furnished or empty. That is enough for a fixed quote with no inspection visit. If the carpets or the oven need more than a standard clean, we will say so up front rather than spring it on you, and book the right work in from the start.
Timing matters more here than people expect. Most tenancies end on the last day of the month, agents on these managed blocks like to inspect fast so they can turn the flat round for the next tenant, and the days around month-end book up quickly on a strip with this much churn. Book a few days ahead if you can. We would rather clean an empty flat the morning of your checkout, with the keys due back that afternoon, than be squeezed into a slot that leaves no room if a clerk wants a second look. The guarantee only helps if there is time to use it.
A standard end of tenancy clean covers the whole flat to the inventory. Some jobs need a bit more, and these are the add-ons people on this strip ask for most. If the carpets have had a hard tenancy, our carpet cleaning uses hot-water extraction to pull dirt out of the pile rather than just freshening the top. Tired sofas and a furnished flat’s soft furnishings get the same through our upholstery cleaning. A baked-in integrated oven is worth our oven cleaning, where the removable parts come out and get cleaned separately, and the outsides of those big glass panels, which we cannot always reach safely from inside a high flat, are a job for our window cleaning team. If you want a lived-in flat brought back to life rather than a checkout clean, our deep cleaning and domestic cleaning services fit better, and if the move itself is the headache, we can help there too with removals.
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 and a real person will talk it through, take the details, give you the price and book a team for a day that suits, weekends included, which is when a lot of checkouts actually happen. You can also use the contact form if you would rather put it in writing, and we will come back to you. For the wider picture of how a checkout clean works across the capital, the end of tenancy cleaning hub covers the method in full.
If your move is just along the river or over the boundary, we are on those streets too. We clean checkouts in the flats inside Battersea Power Station and across at Circus West Village, along the Vauxhall Nine Elms riverside and at St George Wharf, over towards Vauxhall, Kennington and Oval, and west into Battersea Reach and Wandsworth Town. Same list, same guarantee, same fixed price by room.
Nine Elms end of tenancy questions
Do you clean the new-build flats around Battersea Power Station and Embassy Gardens?
Yes, those towers are the bulk of our Nine Elms work. We clean the flats inside and around Battersea Power Station, Embassy Gardens, and the rest of the blocks along the strip from Vauxhall to the power station. These are managed buildings with detailed inventories and a handover standard written into the lease, so we clean to whichever standard the building’s agent or clerk uses at checkout. The flats are new, often furnished and let to tenants who turn over fast, and we clean with that in mind rather than treating every flat as a tired conversion.
How much does an end of tenancy clean in Nine Elms cost?
We price by the size of the flat rather than by the hour, so you get a fixed quote before we start and the team stays until the 57-point list is done. Tell us the postcode, the block, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether the flat is furnished, and we will give you a price over the phone without needing to visit. On a high-deposit riverside flat the clean is almost always a fraction of what a failed checkout would cost you.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or the letting agent challenges our work at checkout, we come back and put it right within 48 hours at no extra charge. It backs up our 57-point checklist and our 97% first-time pass rate, and it means you are not left paying a contractor on top of us if something is queried after we have gone. It is also why we ask you to book with a little time in hand before your keys are due back, so there is room to return if a clerk wants something looked at again.
Does my Nine Elms landlord need a selective licence?
It depends which side of the boundary the flat is on. Most of Nine Elms sits in Wandsworth, in the Nine Elms ward, which is not covered by Wandsworth’s selective licensing scheme, so an ordinary single-household let there does not need a selective licence. The Lambeth fringe near the embassy and the tube is different, because Lambeth runs a much wider selective scheme from September 2025 that covers most of the borough. Either way, a house in multiple occupation needs an HMO licence, since additional HMO licensing applies borough-wide in both councils. Check the council’s postcode tool if you are unsure.
Can the landlord still charge me for cleaning when I leave?
Only if the flat has not been returned to the standard recorded in your check-in inventory, with fair wear and tear set aside. A clause that demands professional cleaning no matter what state you leave the flat in is an unfair term and is not enforceable, as Shelter explains. Your deposit has to sit in a government-backed protection scheme, so a landlord cannot simply keep money for cleaning that was not needed. A checkout clean done to the inventory, with a receipt behind it, is the simplest way to take the argument off the table.
Do I need to be there, and what do you need on the day?
You do not have to be there, as long as we can get in and the keys for handover are sorted. The flat needs electricity and running hot water, everything you own should be out, and the fridge-freezer should be defrosted and switched off. On a managed block, let the concierge know we are coming and book the goods lift if the building insists on one. After that we bring the products, the machines and the checklist and work straight to the inventory so the agent can inspect as soon as we finish.
How do your cleaners get to the towers, and where do they park?
Getting here is easy now the Northern line extension is open, with stations at Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station and Vauxhall a short hop east, plus the 436 and 344 buses along the strip. The van is the harder part. Parking round the new blocks is tight and mostly permit or pay-by-app, and the service roads near the power station and New Covent Garden Market can be busy or closed for deliveries, so we plan loading around that and use a service entrance or loading bay where the building has one. Tell us the block when you book and we will sort the access side out.
Can you clean the oven, the carpets and the inside of the big windows too?
Yes, those are the usual add-ons on this strip and we book them in from the start so nothing is a surprise. An integrated oven gets stripped and cleaned in place, carpets and upholstery get hot-water extraction, and the inside of the floor-to-ceiling glass and the tracks are part of the standard clean. The outside of the high panels we do from inside where it is safe, or flag for the building if it needs a cradle. Tell us when you book and we will quote the lot together with the end of tenancy clean.