End of tenancy cleaning in Old Ford

On a Tredegar Square flat the clerk gets down on one knee and pulls a corner of the rug back, because the wax line on the original parquet around ten years of furniture is the deduction nobody at that address sees coming. That is the kind of detail an end of tenancy clean in Old Ford has to be built around: empty flat, cupboards open, carpets cleared, cleaned to the check-out report and not to a generic idea of tidy, at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee against the inventory itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the E3 patch around Old Ford Road, Roman Road, Tredegar Square, Lyal Road, Parnell Road, the Rounton and William Place blocks, and the Fish Island and Wick Lane new-builds running east toward the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, plus the E3 2 boundary and a small bleed into E9 by the canal. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Tower Hamlets.

How the check-in report quietly marks your deposit

Start with the document, because almost nobody does. When you moved into your Old Ford flat, a clerk walked it and wrote a report describing every surface, nearly always with photos and nearly always with the word “new” or “as new” against the kitchen and bathroom. Those words were true on the day, because the flat had just had a professional clean. At check-out a clerk walks it again and reads down that report line by line. Anything materially worse than the entry it is marked against, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are not being judged against clean. You are being judged against the report.

That is why a mop and a free Saturday rarely clears it. The benchmark was set by a professional clean, and matching it without the kit and the time is hard work that most tenants discover only after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round. The order is almost always that way around, which is a pity, because the first round is the cheap one to win.

The money is not abstract here either. The deposit cap is five weeks’ rent for most assured tenancies, so on an Old Ford two-bed it sits well into four figures. A clerk protecting that sum is paid to find faults rather than wave the flat through, and the inspection is genuinely adversarial. That is not unfair. It means you turn up with evidence, not optimism: a documented clean, and a photo set with a date on it.

Four Old Fords in one postcode, and how each one fails

Old Ford is the northern slice of Bow, the corner of E3 that runs from Roman Road up to the south-east edge of Victoria Park and east toward Fish Island. The wards are Bow West and Bow East, both inside the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The housing splits into four eras, and each one loses a deposit its own way.

The Georgian set-pieces around Tredegar Square

Tredegar Square is the architectural gem of the area, the largest Georgian square in the East End. Three pale-brick terraces went up around the central garden in the 1830s, finished by the late 1840s, with long white cornices, fanlights and railed basements. It sits at the Bow and Mile End fringe, a short walk south of Roman Road, and most of the houses are split into two or three flats. The flats keep the original parquet, the timber-framed bay windows and the picture rails. A clerk on one of these walks straight to the wax line around former furniture positions, the wall above the picture rail where dust has clung for a decade, and the window runners in every room. Get the parquet wrong and the deduction is not a wipe, it is a wax restoration.

The Victorian terraces along Old Ford Road and Roman Road

East and west of the square the stock turns to 1870s to 1890s two-up two-down terraces, on Old Ford Road, Lyal Road, Parnell Road and the streets feeding north. Most are now one upper and one lower flat. The split means the clerk walks each demise on its own and the shared stairwell counts as a deductible area. The faults that show up: bath taps, tile grout, kitchen extractor grease, and the carpet edge against the skirting in the hall. These are long lets, so the build-up sits in the places nobody touched between tenancies.

The ex-council blocks: Rounton and William Place

The Rounton blocks north of Roman Road and the William Place flats to the south are the 1960s and 1970s ex-local-authority stock, brick walk-ups of three to five storeys with shared balconies and small kitchens. The clerk fails these on the bathroom extractor grille, the fridge door rubber, and the brown line where vinyl flooring meets the skirting in the bathroom. We pull every extractor grille on these jobs as standard now, both faces cleaned, because a clean outer face over a dust-brown inner one is the callback we used to get most.

The post-Olympic new-builds off Wick Lane

The fourth era is the 2010s and 2020s infill running east off Wick Lane and the far end of Old Ford Road, toward Fish Island and the Olympic Park: white-gloss kitchens, engineered-oak floors, integrated appliances. The failure here is the smear pattern on the unit fronts and the trim around the integrated dishwasher and washing machine. Different stock, different products, a low-residue finish rather than the descalers an older flat shrugs off.

Old Ford is four different cleaning jobs sharing one postcode, and the report on each one is written to catch a different mistake.

One method does not pass all four. We brief the pair on which era the flat belongs to before they leave the Bow depot.

What changed on 1 May 2026, and what the council does not require

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and existing assured shorthold tenancies have converted to rolling periodic ones, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to end. Here is the part people get wrong: the cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The benchmark is still the check-in report, the deposit maths is still what it was, and nothing in the Act asks more of the clean. What changed is timing. Bow already churns hard, and rolling notice makes the month-end pile-up less predictable, so the dull advice that pays for itself is to book the clean earlier than you used to.

If a deduction is genuinely unfair, the route runs through whichever scheme holds the deposit, then to its free adjudication. A dated, itemised clean and a before-and-after photo set are admissible evidence there, and a tenant with a complete paper trail rarely loses.

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 read against, which is why we clean to it rather than to a general idea of clean.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that report and release the deposit, flat empty, against the letting-agent standard, with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it at £30 per hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

The version you book when you are staying put. Lived-in, no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly upkeep on a home you live in, from £22 an hour.

What Tower Hamlets actually licenses, and where Old Ford sits

This is where landlords and tenants get the council wrong, so here it is straight. Tower Hamlets runs a selective licensing scheme, but it covers only four named wards: Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown. Old Ford, in Bow West and Bow East, is not in it. That scheme is currently set to expire on 30 September 2026 with no renewal announced. What does reach Old Ford is the borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme, live since April 2024, which covers smaller shared houses of three or more occupants across the whole borough. The borough raised the additional HMO fee sharply in early 2026, so a landlord letting an Old Ford house as a share should check the current licence position before the tenancy ends. The council site tends to block automated visits, so confirm ward boundaries with the housing team directly rather than assuming. None of this changes the cleaning bar on a normal flat. It changes the paperwork on a shared house.

The Roman Road market problem on a move-out morning

Roman Road has run a market since the nineteenth century, and it still trades three days a week: Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, mostly along the stretch between St Stephen’s Road and Parnell Road. Stalls set up early and the road is busy through the middle of the day. For a move-out the detail that matters is loading access. A van cannot pull up along the market frontage on those mornings, and the sweep that follows the stalls leaves a fine grit on the pavement that gets walked into ground-floor flats for the rest of the day. We schedule frontage jobs for non-market days where we can, or work the upper flats from the rear where the building allows it. Tell us at booking if your keys go back on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday and the flat is on the market stretch.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

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

The kitchen, where most of the deposit goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped: racks soaked in a tank, the door glass split so the brown film between the panes comes out, then the interior, fan, element and seals. The hob rings lift where they lift, the knobs come off and get degreased, and the extractor hood is cleaned inside and out with the filter pulled and soaked and the grease ridge scraped off the lower lip. Every cupboard, inside, outside, and the high ones above the fridge that nobody dusts. Fridge and freezer through once you have defrosted them, door rubber scrubbed where mould blooms. Integrated units have their own quirks, so the dishwasher filter comes out, the washing-machine drawer soaks, and the trim around each appliance is wiped. The sink, taps and drainer descaled, the aerator opened and cleared, the splashback polished. Tiles and grout brushed where splash hits. Floor mopped, edges and corners by hand, under the kickboards if they pop.

The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tile joints first, with a longer dwell soak on anything that looks older than a few years. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: bowl, under the rim, base, behind the pan, the cistern and the hinge bolts
• Bath and basin descaled, tap chrome polished, the silicone bead at the bath edge checked
• Shower screen both faces, the runner, and the seal where it meets the tile
• Extractor grille pulled off, both faces cleaned, the ceiling paint around it wiped (the ex-council failure)
• Mirror, cabinet, shaver socket, towel rail, and the radiator and wall behind it
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin

Bedrooms, living rooms and the bits between

Inside every wardrobe and built-in cupboard, the top, the drawer runners and the rail. Skirting top edge dusted and the length wiped, including the thicker period profiles around Tredegar Square. Picture rails dusted with the wall above them. Window glass, frames, sills and runners, with the timber bays on the square and Old Ford Road getting the runners brushed rather than spray-wiped. Radiators front, valves, pipework and the wall behind. Carpets vacuumed in two directions and the edge done by hand against the skirting. The original parquet on the square flats gets the wax line lifted with a slow-spin pad and a neutral solvent, then re-fed, about forty minutes on a typical two-bed, because a generic floor spray just darkens it. Hard floors mopped after the dust settles, edges by hand, finished dry. Light fittings, switch plates, sockets, the thermostat and the intercom. Internal doors both sides with hinges, handles, frames and the flat top edge. On a split flat the shared stairwell gets the banister, the spindles, every tread and the communal door handle.

Two of these often want their own pass. Carpet hot-water extraction is written into a fair few tenancies here as a hard requirement, and a hard-used sofa in a shared let sometimes needs a proper job rather than a vacuum. Both can run on the same visit if you say so at booking.

Why we get the occasional callback

The 48-hour re-clean guarantee gets used on roughly three jobs in every hundred across Old Ford. We log every callback, and the same handful of patterns show up: a Tredegar Square parquet wax line where one pass had not reached deep enough, an ex-council extractor grille where the inner face still held dust, a chalky paint flake along a sash runner that a torch caught, and the William Place hall carpet edge where the long strip against the skirting collects what the vacuum misses. We changed the standing method on each of those, which is why the rate is where it is.

Hard water, and the ring that builds at the base of the tap

E3 is on Thames Water, and that supply is hard, around 260 milligrams of calcium carbonate per litre, drawn from the chalk under the Thames Valley. Per their hard water guidance the whole zone sits at the top of the national range. What it means for a check-out is simple: scale sets into the chrome at the tap base, the shower head and the tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk runs a thumbnail down the tap and looks at the shower screen edge-on against the light. In the Victorian split-flats around Lyal Road and Parnell Road the fittings build a chalky ring at the mixer base within months, and on a tap older than three or four years one descale pass is not enough, so we run a second dwell soak. We descale on every job rather than wipe over, which is the difference between a pass and a line on the report.

Scale that has set into the chrome is not a wipe-over job, and the clerk checks the tap base before they check almost anything else.

What it costs, and the maths people run too late

Old Ford sits at our standard London tier, not a premium-borough uplift. The flats here are not Mayfair, even when they front a Georgian square. Prices below are the full price, with kit, products and travel inside the area included.

Add-ons sit on top, all quoted on the call rather than added to the invoice later. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole carpeted two-bed. Oven add-ons, where a landlord wants just the kitchen brought back after a tenant has gone, run £77 for a single, £110 for a double, and £114 for a 90cm range. The wax restoration on a Tredegar Square parquet floor is folded into the EOT quote.

Now run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 against a deposit of five weeks’ rent on an Old Ford flat is not really a decision. Our pass rate across local jobs sits near 97%, and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee is the backstop: if the clerk flags a cleanliness issue inside two days, you tell us, the flat is still as we left it with nobody moved in, and we come back and put it right at no charge. There is a reason agents around Roman Road know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That last number is really the whole point of the job.

A William Place job from this spring

“We had a two-bed on the third floor of the William Place flats, eighteen months, the two of us and no pets. The managing agent had warned at the pre-walk that the bathroom extractor would fail, because the previous tenant left it dust-brown for a year before we moved in. Monster sent two cleaners on a Tuesday, pulled the grille off and did both faces, cleared the scale that had built round the base of the kitchen mixer, and ran a torch along the skirting tops in the hall. The clerk passed it that Friday. We got £2,250 of our £2,310 deposit back. The £60 was a paint scuff above the radiator that was ours.”
Daniel and Sofia, William Place E3, March 2026

That is a fair example of the ex-council pattern: a known extractor problem inherited from the last tenant, hard-water scale at the mixer, and an agent who checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was on the table, and the dated photo set that went out with the invoice is the part most do-it-yourself check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Questions we get asked

What does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Old Ford?

Studio £156, one-bed £207, two-bed £243, three-bed £339, four-bed £425. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom or £115 for a whole carpeted two-bed. These are the standard London rates, not the premium uplift used for boroughs like Kensington or Mayfair. We quote the full figure on the call, with kit, products and travel inside E3 included.

Do you cover Tredegar Square specifically?

Yes, it is one of the addresses we book most. The 1830s Georgian flats keep original parquet under most of the principal rooms, and the timber-framed bay windows need their runners brushed clean rather than spray-wiped. The wax restoration on the parquet is folded into the EOT quote and takes about forty minutes on a typical two-bed.

How much notice do you need before a move-out?

Forty-eight hours is comfortable. Twenty-four we can usually still slot. Same-day is possible if a regular job cancels, but it is not the day to gamble on, because the keys-back deadline is fixed and inventory clerks do not reschedule for a missed clean. Month-end is the tight window in Bow, so book ahead for the last few days of the month.

Will the clean cover the oven and the kitchen extractor?

Yes, both sit inside the 57-point checklist. The oven racks, door glass and fan housing all come out, and the extractor gets the filter pulled and soaked, the grease ridge scraped, and the external panel cleaned. You do not pay extra for either on an end of tenancy job.

What happens if the inventory clerk fails part of the clean?

Call us within 48 hours of the check-out. We come back and put it right at no charge under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, as long as you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Across local jobs the guarantee is used on roughly three in a hundred, which is the 97% first-time pass rate stated on every quote.

Do you handle the hard-water scale on taps and shower heads here?

Yes. E3 is on Thames Water and the supply is hard, around 260 milligrams of calcium carbonate per litre, so the bath taps and shower heads in the period split-flats around Lyal Road and Parnell Road build a chalky ring at the base within months. We descale fully on every job, with a second dwell soak on older fittings, rather than wipe over.

Do you clean the ex-council flats on Rounton and William Place?

Yes. The 1960s and 1970s blocks fail check-outs most often on the bathroom extractor grille and the brown line where vinyl meets the skirting. We pull every grille on these jobs as standard, both faces cleaned, and hand-wipe the vinyl-to-skirting line that the clerk always checks.

What about the new-build flats off Wick Lane and Fish Island?

White-gloss kitchens and engineered-oak floors need a different mop and a low-residue product, so the smear pattern on the unit fronts and the trim around the integrated appliances do not come back. We clean those to the same checklist, with the products the surfaces actually need.

Will Tower Hamlets selective licensing affect my deposit return?

No. Selective licensing in Tower Hamlets covers only Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown, and Old Ford in Bow West and Bow East sits outside it. That scheme is set to expire on 30 September 2026. The borough-wide additional HMO scheme can apply to a shared house here, but it is a landlord licensing duty, not a tenant cleaning one, and it does not change the standard your clean is judged against.

Can you do the carpets at the same time as the clean?

Yes, and that is how a lot of our Roman Road and William Place customers book it. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole carpeted two-bed. The carpet kit comes on the same visit and works alongside the end of tenancy pair.

Do you avoid Roman Road on market mornings?

We try to. The market trades Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, mostly between St Stephen’s Road and Parnell Road, and a van cannot load along the frontage on those days. We schedule frontage jobs for non-market days where we can, or work the upper flats from the rear where the building allows. Tell us at booking if your move-out lands on one of those mornings.

Is there a deposit or upfront payment to book?

No deposit. We invoice on completion, by card on the day, bank transfer in advance, or cash if that is easier. Most customers pay within a day or two, often once their own deposit has come back.

Do you work with my letting agent?

Probably. We coordinate timings, leave keys and send reports for the branches and independents handling the Roman Road terraces, the Tredegar Square flats and the William Place blocks, and we brief the cleaners on which agent manages the flat before they leave the depot. Send over the original check-in report if you have it and we clean straight to it.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Old Ford

Staying put rather than moving out, or bundling another job onto the move? We also offer carpet cleaning in Old Ford, oven cleaning in Old Ford and domestic cleaning in Old Ford.