End of tenancy cleaning throughout North Kensington

On a W10 hand-back the inventory clerk goes to the front bay window before they look at anything else, and they run a finger along the reveal. That grey band there is not ordinary dust. It is fine silicate grit off nearly a decade of scaffolding and estate works along the Westway, and it has been settling on north-facing reveals from Lancaster Road to St Quintin Avenue for years. A cloth just smears it. That is the sort of thing an end of tenancy clean in North Kensington has to answer, and it is why we run every job to a checklist and price it at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the North Kensington end of W10: Ladbroke Grove, Golborne, Kensal Town, Latimer Road and the Cheltenham Estate, plus the W11 fringe around St Marks Road and Oxford Gardens. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Kensington and Chelsea.

How the check-out report quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does. When you moved into your W10 flat, a clerk walked it and wrote a check-in inventory: every surface described, usually photographed, usually with the word “clean” against the kitchen and bathroom because the place had just been done. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are marked against that first report, not against a spotless ideal, which is exactly why a mop and a spare Saturday rarely gets you there.

The money is real. Rents in the North Kensington end of the borough sit under prime Kensington but well above the London median, so a two-bed off Cambridge Gardens or Bramley Road tends to carry a deposit between £2,600 and £3,400 once you apply the five-week cap under the Tenant Fees Act 2019. Against that, the deductions on a W10 DIY check-out land in a familiar order: hard-water scale on bath taps and the shower screen, picture-rail and dado dust in long period hallways, that silicate band on the front-window reveals, and oven door glass. The Cheltenham Estate flats have a shorter list of their own: balcony glass both sides, the heat-cabinet cover panel, and the deep 1970s storage cupboard where dust has quietly banked for years.

Why is the clerk so exacting? The deposit is large and the agent is on the hook for accounting for it, so the inspection is genuinely adversarial and the clerk is paid to find faults, not wave you through. That is not unfair. It just means you turn up with the flat already answering the report, not hoping.

You are marked against that first report, not against a spotless ideal.

RBKC licensing, and what 1 May 2026 changed for W10

Two bits of the legal backdrop are worth getting right, because they change who cares about your check-out.

First, licensing. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea runs the mandatory HMO scheme for houses let to five or more people from two or more households, and on top of that a borough-wide additional HMO scheme that catches smaller shared houses, three or more people from two or more households sharing facilities. That additional scheme runs from 1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028 across the whole borough, North Kensington included. There is no selective licensing scheme in RBKC, so a single-family let in W10 is not licensable the same way. If your flat is a shared house, your landlord holds a licence the council can inspect against, and a check-out report with a long cleaning section is exactly the document that ends up in that file. A clean hand-back keeps the landlord onside and your reference friendly for the next W10 flat.

The Renters’ Rights Act and the churn it brought

Second, the law that changed on 1 May 2026. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 abolished Section 21 no-fault eviction and converted every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England to a periodic one, 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 at all. The Tenant Fees Act still applies, the check-in benchmark still applies, and the deposit maths is what it was the week before. What changed is timing. North Kensington was already high-churn, with quick turnovers on the above-shop and estate lets; roll people onto a rolling notice and the move-outs get more frequent and less predictable, so the slot you want fills sooner. Book earlier than you think you need to.

If a dispute does reach adjudication, the deposit stays with one of the three approved schemes, TDS, mydeposits or DPS, and the test for a cleaning deduction has not moved: the landlord must show the flat came back dirtier than the check-in recorded, fair wear allowed. Shelter set out the rest of the dispute path plainly if you end up there.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

Every North Kensington booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks working W10 actually flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of these deposits go

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks come out to soak, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes comes off, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. The extractor filter is soaked or swapped, and in the tight above-shop kitchens off Golborne and Portobello that filter has often not been touched in years because the turnover is quick. Then the rest of the room: hob and control knobs off and washed, every cupboard inside and out, fridge and freezer through once defrosted, the integrated units in the newer Latimer Road infill handled their own way. We pull the appliances out so the gaps behind the fridge and washer are done, then put them back. Sink, taps and drainer descaled, tiles and grout scrubbed, floor mopped.

The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tile joints first, and W10 water makes that the second deduction line on nearly every job. Then the toilet done properly, inside, under the rim, base and hinges and behind the pedestal; the shower screen both sides with the track and the sealant bead; the bath, taps and overflow; mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they come off the wall; the extractor vent wiped and the silicone cleaned to a usable state, though re-sealing is a handyman job and not a cleaning one. Floor into the corners and behind the loo last.

Bedrooms, living rooms and the period detail

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, door frames, handles and finger plates. Light fittings, lampshades, switches, and the ceiling roses and picture rails that a Lancaster Road or Oxford Gardens flat carries, which hold years of dust and get checked from the doorway looking up. Window glass, frames and the front-bay reveal on the inside, with the reveal brushed and vacuumed before the wipe. Radiators behind, under and on top; the cast-iron ones in the older houses take longer than a modern panel. Walls spot-wiped for marks with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill, not yours to scrub. Then the stairs and bannisters, cobwebs out of the corners, and a final photographed walk-through of every room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

Two of these often need their own pass. Long period hallways off Lancaster Road nearly always want hot-water extraction on the runner rather than a dry powder, because of the depth of the foot-traffic line, which is what the carpet cleaning add-on covers on the same visit. A hard-used sofa in a shared let sometimes needs full upholstery cleaning too.

Hard water and Westway dust: the two things W10 punishes

Two North Kensington realities cost more deposits than people expect, and a casual clean answers neither.

The first is the water. W10 is on Thames Water, which draws off chalk and limestone and classes its whole supply as hard, tipping into very hard at around 300 mg/l calcium carbonate across West London. On a bath tap or a shower screen after a few un-descaled years that reads as a chalky white bloom a sponge will not shift. The clerk checks for it deliberately: a thumbnail down the tap, the screen held edge-on to the light, the shower head pulled in close. Set-in scale is not a quick job, and where the fittings are older chrome we take the careful route rather than a brute-force product. The second is the dust. The remediation and repair works around Lancaster West and the towers along the Westway have kept scaffolds, hoardings and fine grinding dust near a lot of W10 streets for the best part of a decade, and it settles as a silicate band on north-facing reveals and meeting rails that a normal wipe drags around rather than lifts. So we brush the channel, vacuum the rebate, then damp-microfibre the reveal and the surround, and treat it as a flagged item before we leave.

North Kensington street by street: stucco, estate and above-shop

North Kensington is the mixed northern end of the borough, and the housing changes street to street, so one method does not pass all of it. Confirm your road by postcode when you book. Broadly it works out as three kinds of flat.

The stucco terraces and garden flats

The Notting Hill fringe runs up into W10 as three to five-storey mid-Victorian stucco terraces, most split horizontally into a hall flat on the ground floor and a garden flat below. Lancaster Road, Cambridge Gardens, St Marks Road and Oxford Gardens on the W11 side are the classic stock: original picture rails and deep skirting, occasional cornicing in the front reception, the odd cast-iron grate. The rail-and-cornice dust trap is the headline item and the clerks check it first; the front bay is the second, with its reveal dust and traffic film. Bathrooms in these splits are usually converted box-rooms with a shower over the bath, so the chrome scale line matters. These are the ones where a period conversion earns its longer clean.

The estate flats

The Cheltenham Estate around the Trellick Tower is a different proposition. Erno Goldfinger’s 1972 tower is Grade II* listed, so the original layout inside the flats, the kitchen plate, the bathroom, the integrated storage cupboard with the heat-cabinet, and the balcony glazing all get cleaned at a care level that respects the listing. We do not touch the brutalist concrete or the access-walkway floor unless the resident or the housing manager asks. The wider Wornington and Silchester blocks and the streets of the Lancaster West Estate clean more conventionally, but the checks are specific: balcony glass both sides, the heat-cabinet cover panel, the kitchen run, and that deep storage cupboard where dust sits behind the doors. We handle any home in the Lancaster West area with the care the last few years there deserve.

The above-shop and new-build flats

Third are the flats over the market. Portobello Road’s northern end and Golborne Road, the Portuguese and Moroccan market street under the Trellick, carry tight kitchens above the traders, often vented through an old wall plate, with front windows that look down onto Saturday Portobello and Friday Golborne traffic. The inside meeting rail of every front window there bonds a film of that grime, so we take the rail edge apart as far as the catch allows and detail the corners with a stiff narrow brush. The small 2010s infill behind the Westway flyover off Latimer Road cleans more like a new-build: integrated appliances, brushed-chrome handles, a shower screen on hinges, and a floor-to-wall silicone bead the clerk runs a nail along.

One method does not pass all of North Kensington, so we work it as three kinds of flat.

What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until it is late

North Kensington sits on our standard pricing. It is the mixed W10 end of the borough, not prime Kensington, so these are base rates with no premium bumped on top. Studios start at £156, one-beds at £207, two-beds at £243, three-beds at £339 and four-beds at £425. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Ovens are billed separately at £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range. Where you would rather buy time than a fixed package, the rate is £30 per cleaner per hour. You pay on completion by bank transfer, no deposit up front.

Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A five-year family let with the picture rails never properly done, a pet household, or a kitchen that has not had a deep clean in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. Run the maths the way the deposit makes you: a two-bed at £243 to protect a deposit north of £2,600 is not really a decision. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so if the inventory clerk flags anything on the cleaning section within that window, we come back and put it right at no extra cost, provided nobody has moved in and the flat is as we left it. Our first-time pass rate across these jobs sits at 97%, and over the years the work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. There is a reason the agents know us; we are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, including the North Kensington and Notting Hill teams.

A Golborne Road job from the spring

“We had the top flat over a shop on Golborne Road for two years, me and my flatmate, both nurses. The kitchen was the worry: one tiny window, an extractor that vented through the wall, and grease on everything from cooking in a box room. The agent had already told us the check-in photos showed it spotless. Two cleaners came on the Friday, took the extractor plate off the wall and the oven door apart, and got the meeting rail on the front window clean where the market dust had baked on. It came back with no cleaning deductions and the deposit landed nine days later. Cheaper than the deduction would have been, and a lot less argument.”
Aidan, ex-tenant, one-bed above a shop on Golborne Road W10, May 2026

That is a fair example of the above-shop pattern: a tight vented kitchen, front-window grime off the market, and an agent who checks against real photos. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake, which it usually does, and the dated photo set sent with the invoice is the part a DIY check-out never has when the agent pushes back.

Booking it, and the access problem on the estates

The steps:

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your W10 or W11 postcode, the property size, the check-out date, and which agent you are handing back to. Price in about three minutes.
2. We quote a fixed price the same day from the band above, plus any add-ons.
3. We confirm a window the morning before. Most North Kensington jobs run from 9am to between 1pm and 4pm depending on size and the kind of flat.
4. The crew arrives in a marked van with all the chemicals, machines, ladders and microfibres. You supply nothing but the water.
5. You pay on completion, and we hold the 48-hour re-clean window open while the clerk does the check-out.

One honest note on access, because it is the thing that slows a W10 move-out. A flat in the Trellick Tower or on the Cheltenham Estate usually needs a concierge sign-in or a key fob, and lift and service access on the estates has its own rules, so tell us in advance and we will plan the day around it. Parking on the terraced streets off Ladbroke Grove is permit-controlled and tight; give us the arrangement when you book, and confirm how we get in. If you would rather put the move and the clean on one booking, we also do removals, which genuinely helps on these narrow streets where several van trips turn into a problem.

Add-ons, the job next to it, and nearby areas

A North Kensington 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 is the other common one, often a contractual line on the period-flat hallways, and where the inventory asks for the exterior glass, window cleaning folds into the same visit. Three jobs get muddled here, and it is worth booking the right one.

Check-in inventory report

The document the 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 and not to a generic idea of clean.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, 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, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

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

We work the streets around here too, which matters when your next flat is one over or your tenancy straddles a line. Within the borough there is Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill to the south, Portobello Road along the market, Kensal Town to the north, and Westbourne Park on the W2 edge. Kensal Green sits just north across the cemetery in Brent, so if your postcode is really NW10, ring and we will still sort you.

Questions we get asked

How much is an end of tenancy clean in North Kensington?

£156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. These are base rates: North Kensington is the mixed W10 end of the borough, not prime Kensington, so there is no premium added. Add £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double, £114 for a 90cm range, and £36 a bedroom for carpet shampoo. The by-the-hour rate for a part job is £30 per cleaner.

Will you guarantee I get my deposit back?

No cleaning company honestly can, because the decision is the clerk’s and the agent’s, taken against the check-in report and the photos from the day. What we guarantee is the cleaning section of the check-out. If your clerk flags anything on that within 48 hours of our visit, we come back and put it right at no extra cost. Across the tenants we have worked with since 2014 the work has helped recover £1.2m of deposits.

Does the price change for a stucco terrace flat versus an estate flat?

Not by archetype, no. The price follows the number of bedrooms and the state of the flat, not whether it is a Lancaster Road garden flat or a Trellick Tower one-bed. A long period hallway with picture rails throughout can push a job to the upper end of its time band, and we will say so when we quote; an estate one-bed is usually quicker. Same rate card either way.

Do you clean inside the Trellick Tower and the Cheltenham Estate?

Yes, regularly. The Trellick flats need a specific care level because Goldfinger’s original 1972 interior layout is protected by the Grade II* listing, so the kitchen plate, the original bathroom, the integrated storage cupboard with the heat-cabinet, and the balcony glazing all get cleaned with that in mind. We do not touch the brutalist concrete walkways or any external listed feature unless the resident or the housing manager has asked. Access usually needs the concierge or a key fob, so tell us in advance.

What about the construction and remediation dust on the front windows?

The works around Lancaster West and the towers along the Westway have kept scaffolds and grinding dust near a lot of W10 streets for years. The result on north-facing front windows is a fine silicate band along the reveal and meeting rail that a normal wipe just moves around. We brush the channel, vacuum the rebate, then damp-microfibre the reveal and surround, and because the clerks check it we treat it as a flagged item before we leave.

How is my flat affected by RBKC licensing?

If your flat is a shared house of three or more people from two or more households, it falls under the borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme that runs to 31 May 2028, and your landlord holds a licence the council can inspect against. A long cleaning-deduction list on your check-out is the kind of thing that ends up in that compliance file, which is awkward for the landlord at renewal, so a clean hand-back keeps everyone onside. A single-family let is not licensable the same way; there is no selective scheme in RBKC.

How long does a North Kensington end of tenancy clean take?

A one-bed Trellick flat or a small Latimer Road infill runs 4 to 5 hours with two cleaners. A two-bed hall or garden flat off Cambridge Gardens runs 5 to 7 hours. A three-bed period flat with a long hallway and picture rails throughout runs 7 to 9 hours, sometimes a full day if it is a five-year family let with the rails never done. A whole hall-and-garden split can be a full-day job for a crew of three.

Can you clean on the same day as the check-out?

Yes, if the check-out is in the afternoon. Better is the day before, because it gives the 48-hour re-clean window room to work. If the clerk flags anything we can come back the next morning and fix it before the agent finalises the report.

Do I need to be there?

No. You can leave a key with us, with the agent’s office, or with the Trellick concierge if the flat is in the listed block. Most W10 jobs are done with the tenant already moved out and the keys passed through the agent.

Do you do carpets and ovens on the same visit?

Yes, and it is worth scheduling both at booking so we send a crew of three rather than two. The oven add-on is £77 for a single or £110 for a double. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom or £115 for a whole two-bed, on a hot-water extraction machine. Period-flat hallway runners almost always need extraction rather than a dry powder because of the depth of the foot-traffic line.

Are you a real, insured company?

Yes. Monster Cleaning Ltd has traded since 2014 and is registered at Companies House under number 9919639. We carry public liability insurance, the crew arrives in a marked van, and you pay on completion by bank transfer with no deposit taken up front. We cover North Kensington and the rest of RBKC every week; travel is built into the quote.