A nun’s head, a Victorian cemetery, and why move-out week runs differently here
End of tenancy cleaning
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A Nunhead move-out is shaped by hills, narrow Victorian streets, a station with no Underground line, and an agent or landlord who expects the keys handed back to the standard in the inventory. Get the clean wrong and the deposit is where it shows up.
The name is the grim bit first. The story locals tell is that a nun was beheaded during the dissolution of the monasteries and her head stuck on a pike on the green, which is how the Old Nun’s Head pub got its sign and how the whole place got its name.
True or not, it tells you something. Nunhead is old, a bit odd, and proud of both. You feel it the moment you turn off the main roads and the streets start climbing.
Where it sits
The thing that actually governs a move-out here is the geography. Nunhead sits on a slope in the south-east corner of the London Borough of Southwark, SE15, ringed by:
- Peckham to the north
- East Dulwich to the west
- Honor Oak and Brockley to the south
- Telegraph Hill and New Cross Gate to the east
The cemetery above it all
- What it is
- Nunhead Cemetery is one of the Magnificent Seven, the great Victorian burial grounds laid out around the edge of London.
- Age and size
- It was consecrated in 1840, runs to about 52 acres, and is the second largest of the seven.
- Today
- Most of it is now a Local Nature Reserve, half wild, with a ruined Gothic chapel and a view from the top that takes in St Paul’s.
- Who looks after it
- The Friends of Nunhead Cemetery keep it going and run the open days, and the place is full of First and Second World War graves looked after by the war graves commission.
It is gorgeous. It is also, on a practical level, a very large green wedge that a removals van cannot drive through, which matters more than you would think when you are trying to get a sofa out of a flat on Limesford Road.
The reservoirs underneath
The other landmark people forget is underground. Nunhead is built over a set of covered Victorian reservoirs, and the nine-hole Aquarius Golf Club, founded in 1912 by the old Metropolitan Water Board, actually sits on the roof of one of them. You would not know it from the street.
It matters here only as a marker of how the place is laid out:
- the high ground to the south
- the reservoirs and the golf club
- then the cemetery
- then the village in the dip
The terraces are threaded up and down the slopes in between. That topography is why no two streets present the same parking problem.
This page is the long version: how the area is built, what the check-out clerk looks for, what we actually do, and how the deposit rules fall once you have gone.
No Tube, two rail lines, and a hill in the way
Nunhead has no Underground station and never has, and its streets are steep and parked solid. Both shape how you physically get out.
- The station
- A National Rail station, rebuilt and reopened years back, served by Southeastern and Thameslink, with trains toward Blackfriars and St Pancras one way and Victoria and the Kent suburbs the other.
- The streets
- This is steep, terraced south London. Roads like Gellatly Road, Ivydale Road and the run up toward One Tree Hill are tight, parked solid on both sides, and on a gradient. A Luton van does not love any of that.
For commuters that is fine. For a move it changes the calculus, because there is no Tube to lean on and a lot of people here run their whole moving day around the train timetable and a hired van.
We plan around it. Our cleaners come by car with the kit in the boot rather than assuming there is a loading bay, because round here there usually is not. If you are booking a removals firm as well:
- give them the heads up about the hill and the parking
- book a suspension from Southwark if you need the van directly outside; the bays fill early on a Saturday
The village on a Saturday
The heart of Nunhead is Nunhead Green and the run of shops along Nunhead Lane and Evelina Road, which is genuinely village-like by London standards:
- the Old Nun’s Head on a corner of the green
- Ayres the bakers, who have been at it since 1955
- FC Soper the fishmonger, going back to the end of the 1800s
- a butcher and a greengrocer
- newer arrivals like the sourdough pizza place
It is a nice place to live and a slightly awkward place to park a van on a Saturday, because everyone else is there too, doing their shopping.
Why access matters to the clean
The order of the day decides whether the clean is any good. The flat needs to be empty when we arrive. If the removals are still ferrying boxes down to the station at noon, we are cleaning around furniture, and a clerk can tell. The smooth version is simple:
- Movers first.
- Us second, into an empty property.
- The electricity on and the hot water running, so we can actually do the job.
We will say more about that further down, but it starts with the geography, and the geography here is the cemetery, the hill and the train.
What people actually rent in Nunhead
The housing here is mostly Victorian and Edwardian, with a layer of council building on top and a thin scatter of new infill. That mix is the whole story of how deposits get lost, so it is worth being specific.
- Victorian terraces
- The classic Nunhead home is a two-storey Victorian terrace, bay-fronted, often carved into two flats. There are some genuinely fine late-Victorian and Edwardian streets, Carden Road and Tresco Road among them, where the houses have kept their original details.
- Conversions
- This is where most of the renting happens: a ground-floor flat with the original cornicing and a knocked-through kitchen, or a top-floor flat tucked into the old roof with sloping ceilings and a shower room squeezed under the eaves.
- Council and ex-council
- The mid-century estates that the old LCC and Southwark built, plus blocks of flats that came later. A lot of those flats are let privately now by leaseholders who bought and moved on.
- New-build infill
- A steady drip of it, the odd small development squeezed onto a former yard, which behaves like any modern flat at check-out, all sealed units and gloss surfaces that show every smear.
Older sash and casement windows are common. Bay windows that have never been double glazed are common. Both of those are mould traps, and mould is a check-out problem.
The ex-council flats clean up well, but they have their own quirks:
- communal entrances you do not control
- storage heaters
- kitchens with units that have seen a few tenancies
There are even a couple of sets of nineteenth-century almshouses still standing near the green, a reminder that this was a working neighbourhood long before anyone called it up-and-coming.
The river under the lower streets
One quirk of the ground itself feeds into the damp problems. The River Peck, the little watercourse that gave Peckham its name, runs underground through here now, culverted out of sight, and the dip between Nunhead and Peckham Rye sits low and wet.
Ground-floor flats on the lower streets can hold damp, and a clerk will note any black spotting in a corner or behind a wardrobe. It is not your fault the river is down there, but the mould it encourages is still treated as a cleaning matter at check-out.
Higher rents, a higher bar
Nunhead has been gentrifying for a while now, the knock-on from Peckham working its way south and east. What that means for a tenant is that rents and expectations have both climbed.
The agent letting a smartened-up conversion off Evelina Road is checking it out against a detailed, photo-heavy inventory, and the bar for “clean” is wherever the check-in report set it. Knowing which type of place you are handing back tells you where the clean is going to be judged.
Bay windows that have never been double glazed are common. Both of those are mould traps, and mould is a check-out problem.
The Nunhead and Queen’s Road licence your landlord may need
If you rent an ordinary flat or house in the Nunhead and Queen’s Road ward from a private landlord, that landlord almost certainly needs a selective licence for it, whether or not the property is a shared house. This one trips people up, so here is the current position, checked rather than assumed.
- Additional HMO licensing
- Southwark runs a borough-wide additional licensing scheme for houses in multiple occupation, in force since 1 March 2022 and set to run for five years. If it is a shared house above the size threshold, it can apply as well.
- Selective licensing
- The council has selective licensing in a long list of named wards, and Nunhead sits inside it. The Nunhead and Queen’s Road ward is covered by Southwark’s second selective licensing designation, which started on 1 November 2023 and runs for five years. The neighbouring Peckham Rye ward is in the same scheme.
- Who is caught
- It is not only the big HMOs. A standard single-household let in this ward is caught.
Why it matters at check-out
Licensing changes the relationship at check-out, and usually in the tenant’s favour. A licensed landlord has signed up to conditions and is on the council’s radar, which tends to mean:
- a proper managing agent
- a proper check-in inventory
- a proper deposit-protection trail
That paper trail is exactly what you lean on if there is a fight over a cleaning deduction later.
The Southwark position is clear that letting in these wards is regulated. For the underlying law on how all of this hangs together, the framework now sits in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which you can read in full on legislation.gov.uk.
One honest caveat
Licensing wards are drawn on a map, and Nunhead’s boundaries are not the same as the postcode. Most of what people call Nunhead falls in the Nunhead and Queen’s Road ward, but the edges blur into Peckham Rye and Peckham.
If you are a landlord and you are not certain which ward a property is in, check before you let, because letting without a required licence is an offence and it hands the tenant a rent-repayment claim.
How a check-out actually gets scored
Once the keys are back, the clean stops being your problem and becomes the clerk’s report. That report is a comparison, and it helps to know how it is built.
- At the start of the tenancy somebody, usually an independent inventory clerk, walked the property and wrote a check-in inventory: a room-by-room record, schedule of condition, photos of every surface and fitting, with notes on cleanliness.
- At the end, the same kind of clerk does a check-out and compares the two.
- If a line fails, it gets photographed and costed, and the cost is proposed as a deduction from your protected deposit.
The question is never “is this clean in the abstract.” It is “is this as clean as it was at check-in, allowing for fair wear and tear.” That phrase, fair wear and tear, is the hinge of the whole thing.
- Wear
- A carpet that has faded a little over two years.
- Chargeable
- A carpet with a curry stain ground into it is damage or a failure to clean.
The clerk works to a standard, and the cleaning industry’s professional standard for end of tenancy is a deep clean, not a wipe round:
- inside the oven, and behind it
- on top of the units
- inside cupboards and drawers
- descaled taps and shower screens
- dust off the tops of doors and picture rails
- hoovered and, where needed, washed floors
- clean windows inside
The agent-facing version of that list, on our jobs, runs to 57 points, which is roughly what a Nunhead clerk is ticking against.
Why cleaning gets disputed
Cleaning is the single most disputed line on these reports, and the deposit schemes say as much. It is subjective in a way that a broken handle is not, which is exactly why landlords reach for it and why tenants should not just accept it.
A clerk cannot fairly charge you to “professionally clean” a flat that you already had professionally cleaned, if the photos do not show dirt. The report has to point at something specific, a greasy unit top, a limescaled screen, an oven that was missed, not a general feeling that it could be cleaner.
The good news is that this is a documented process, not a guess, and documentation cuts both ways. If the work was done to standard, the clerk’s own photos are your defence. That is the whole point of having it cleaned properly in the first place, by someone who cleans to that exact list.
What we do on a Nunhead move-out
Our end of tenancy clean is a full deep clean of the empty property, priced by the size and condition of the place rather than by the hour, so the team stays until the list is done. Here is what that covers, in the order it tends to happen.
The kitchen
The kitchen takes the longest, and it is where most deductions live.
- Units degreased inside and out, including the tops where the airborne fat settles and nobody ever looks
- Shelves and trays out of the oven to soak, and the door glass, which clouds over where the two seals sit, scrubbed back by hand
- Hob, extractor and filter, and the splashback
- Sink and taps descaled
- Fridge and freezer wiped through once they are defrosted and empty
The bathroom
The bathroom is the other battleground.
- Limescale off the taps, screen and tiles
- Grout scrubbed
- Toilet done properly, including the hinges and the bit behind
- Extractor fan dusted
- Mirror and chrome polished
The rest of the flat, top down
- Cobwebs and the tops of doors and frames
- Picture rails and curtain poles
- Light fittings and switches
- Skirting boards and radiators
- The insides of any fitted wardrobes
- Internal glass and the windows inside, sills and the runners where the grime collects in an old sash
- Carpets hoovered throughout, hard floors hoovered and washed
Then the bits people forget because they are at the edges: the spot of mould in the bay reveal, the marks where the bed headboard rubbed the wall, behind the radiator on the landing.
What we ask of you
A couple of things decide whether the clean lands:
- The property needs to be empty, with your belongings gone.
- The electricity and the hot water need to be on.
- The fridge and freezer want defrosting the night before, not on the day, or the team is standing around mopping meltwater instead of cleaning.
Give us that, and we can hit the 57-point standard the local agents expect.
When a place needs more
Some places need more than the standard clean, and we would rather tell you up front than have a clerk find it. If a carpet is badly marked, a machine extraction is a separate job from the hoover-through that the end of tenancy clean includes.
Same with a sofa or a mattress that has taken a beating, or an oven that has not been touched in years, or the outsides of the windows on a flat where the bay faces the street. You can add any of those:
- a deep carpet clean with hot-water extraction where hoovering will not cut it
- upholstery and mattress cleaning, our upholstery service, for furnished lets
- a dedicated oven clean when the appliance is years past a wipe
- exterior window cleaning by water-fed pole for ground and upper floors
- hard-floor restoration through our floor care for tired tiles or worn boards
If you would rather hand over the whole move, we also do removals, a one-off deep clean for places that are not a tenancy at all, and regular domestic cleaning once you are into the new flat. It all sits under the wider end of tenancy service.
The deposit rules that sit on the tenant’s side
People assume the landlord holds the cards on a deposit. They mostly do not, and it is worth knowing why before you accept a deduction you do not agree with.
If you rent on the kind of tenancy most Nunhead renters are on, your deposit has to be protected in a government-approved scheme within 30 days of the landlord receiving it, and you have to be given the prescribed information that says where. There are three schemes, and a few terms are worth having straight:
- Deposit protection
- Your money must be held in one of three government-backed schemes and the rules explained on gov.uk. If it was never protected, the landlord is on weak ground over any deduction and you may be owed compensation.
- Check-in and check-out inventory
- The before-and-after record the whole dispute turns on. Without a clear, dated, photographed check-in, a landlord struggles to prove the place is dirtier now than it was then.
- Fair wear and tear
- The normal deterioration of a property from ordinary living. You cannot be charged to put right wear; you can be charged for damage or a genuine failure to clean.
- Dispute resolution
- If you cannot agree, the deposit scheme runs a free adjudication. You raise it, both sides send evidence, an adjudicator decides. With mydeposits, for instance, a tenant generally has to raise a dispute within three months of moving out; see the mydeposits tenant pages.
The practical upshot: do not just wave through a cleaning charge.
- Ask for the check-out report and the photos.
- Compare them against your check-in.
- If the deduction is for “cleaning” but the place was professionally done, push back.
Charities like Shelter set out your rights clearly, and the deposit scheme’s adjudicators see chancer cleaning deductions all the time. A paid invoice for an end of tenancy clean, plus the clerk’s own photos, is a strong hand.
Where deposits actually leak in an SE15 conversion
After enough Nunhead jobs you learn where the money quietly goes. It is almost never the middle of the floor. It is the edges, the tops and the bits that need a specific product.
- Grease is the big one. The tops of kitchen units in a converted flat collect a sticky brown film that a clerk will run a finger through, and it is invisible from standing height.
- Oven glass is second; that cloudy inner pane fails more check-outs than anything else in the kitchen.
- Limescale is third, because south London water is hard and it crusts round the base of taps, along the shower screen and over the tiles, and it does not come off with a normal spray.
- Then mould, which loves an old single-glazed Nunhead bay and a poorly ventilated under-eaves shower room, beading along the sealant and in the window reveals.
After that it is the predictable list:
- skirting boards furred with dust behind where furniture stood
- the insides of fitted wardrobes nobody emptied properly
- sash window runners packed with grit
- radiator backs
- extractor fans grey with fluff
- the marks on the wall where a bed or a sofa lived for two years
None of it is hard if you know it is coming and you have the right kit. All of it is chargeable if you do not. That is the difference between a clean that passes and a clean that triggers a “professional clean required” line on the report.
What it costs, and the re-clean if a clerk pushes back
We price an end of tenancy clean by the property, not the clock, and what you are really paying for is the guarantee behind it.
- What sets the price
- How many bedrooms and bathrooms there are and what condition the place is in. That is fairer than an hourly rate, because nobody is watching a meter and the team can stay until the 57-point list is genuinely finished.
- Where to see it
- You can see the current rates and get a fixed quote on our prices page, or just ring and describe the flat.
- The standard
- We clean to a 57-point, agent-approved checklist.
- If a clerk pushes back
- On the rare job where an inventory clerk or landlord challenges the work, we come back and put it right with a free 48-hour re-clean, as long as you flag it within that window and nothing has changed in the property since we left.
Agents keep using us because of that guarantee. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across south London, and over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
One more point on value. A re-clean called in by a clerk is the worst time to be hunting for a cheap one-off cleaner, because:
- you are out of the flat
- the clock on the deposit is running
- the agent wants it sorted now
The 48-hour re-clean exists precisely so that moment is our problem, not yours.
That guarantee is not a marketing line; it is why agents keep using us.
Booking a move-out clean around the green
Booking is quick. Tell us the postcode, the date you are handing back the keys, and roughly the size and state of the place, and we will give you a fixed price and a slot.
We work seven days a week, which matters in Nunhead because so many tenancies end on a Friday or a weekend and the agent wants the keys back on the Monday. Timing is everything on a move-out:
- Book the clean for after the removals, into an empty flat, on or just before your check-out, so the place is spotless when the clerk walks in and there is no gap for it to get dusty again.
- Sort your van parking near the green and up the hill in advance.
- Get the fridge defrosting the night before.
- Then call us on 0333 555 2076 or use the contact page, and we will take it from there.
We cover the whole of this corner of south-east London, so if you are moving within the area or just over the boundary we have you. Nearby we clean in:
- Peckham and Peckham Rye to the north
- East Dulwich and Camberwell to the west
- Honor Oak and Brockley over the hill to the south
- Telegraph Hill and New Cross to the east
Same checklist, same guarantee, wherever the flat is.
Nunhead move-out questions, answered
How much does end of tenancy cleaning in Nunhead cost?
It depends on the size and condition of the property, not the hours worked. We price by the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and how heavy the clean is, then give you a fixed quote, so there are no surprises on the day. You can check current rates on our prices page or ring 0333 555 2076 and describe the flat.
Will the clean be enough to get my full deposit back?
That is the whole aim. We clean to a 57-point, agent-approved checklist. If a clerk does flag something, the free 48-hour re-clean covers it, and a paid cleaning invoice plus the clerk’s photos is strong evidence if there is any dispute over a deduction.
Do I need to be there while you clean?
No. Most people hand over a key or arrange access through the agent and let us get on with it. What we do need is an empty property with the electricity and hot water on, because we cannot clean properly around furniture or without power. If you can be there at the end to lock up, that is a bonus, not a requirement.
My landlord says they need a licence for the flat. Is that right in Nunhead?
Quite possibly, yes. Nunhead sits in the Nunhead and Queen’s Road ward, which is covered by Southwark’s selective licensing scheme that started on 1 November 2023, so an ordinary private let here usually needs a licence, not just shared HMOs. There is also borough-wide additional HMO licensing. A licensed landlord normally means a proper inventory and a clean deposit trail, which helps you at check-out.
What is the difference between an end of tenancy clean and a normal clean?
A normal or regular clean keeps a lived-in home tidy. An end of tenancy clean is a full deep clean of an empty property, judged against the check-in inventory: inside the oven and units, behind appliances, descaled bathrooms, dusted from the tops of doors down, windows cleaned inside. It is the standard inventory clerks expect, which is why it is a different job from a weekly tidy.
How far in advance should I book?
As soon as you know your check-out date. We work seven days a week and can often fit you in at short notice, but Nunhead tenancies cluster around Fridays and weekends, so the popular slots go first. Booking early also lets you line up the order of the day: removals out, then us in, into an empty flat.
Can you clean carpets, ovens and the outside of the windows too?
Yes. Hoovering carpets is part of the end of tenancy clean, and the oven is an add-on. Where a carpet is badly stained we add hot-water extraction through our carpet cleaning, the oven gets a dedicated oven clean, and exterior glass is handled by water-fed pole as window cleaning. We will tell you up front if your place needs any of them.
What happens if the inventory clerk is not happy with the clean?
You let us know within 48 hours and we come back and re-clean the points raised, free of charge, as long as nothing has changed in the property since we finished. That 48-hour re-clean is there so a clerk’s complaint becomes our job to fix, not a panic for you while the deposit clock is running. If a deduction is still pushed unfairly, the deposit scheme’s free adjudication, explained by Shelter, is the next step.