End of tenancy cleaning across Old Kent Road

The first thing a clerk does in one of the new Old Kent Road flats is drag a thumbnail across the quartz worktop by the tap, then tilt the shower screen against the window light. Scale film and a dulled edge are the two marks that lose deposits on a new-build here, and the night-before wipe never touches either. That is the job we do: a hand-back clean built to satisfy the person writing the check-out report, on the day the keys go back, at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against that report. We are Monster Cleaning, working across south-east London since 2014. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in a few minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the Old Kent Road corridor across SE1 and SE15, plus the SE17 fringe toward Walworth and Burgess Park, from Bricklayer’s Arms down to New Cross Gate. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Southwark.

How the check-in report quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because it is the whole game and almost nobody explains it. When you moved in, an inventory clerk walked the flat and wrote a report describing every surface, nearly always with photos, and against the kitchen and bathroom they usually wrote “clean to a professional standard”. That was true on the day, because the flat had just been cleaned by a firm doing exactly what we do. At check-out a different clerk walks it again and compares your flat, line by line, against that report. Anything worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is money the landlord can take off your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a spare evening rarely gets you across the line.

The numbers are not made up either. The Deposit Protection Service says cleaning was behind 29.38% of the deposit claims it handled in 2025, the fifth year running it has topped their list, up from 24.57% back in 2021. The Tenancy Deposit Scheme puts cleaning in more than half of all the disputes its adjudicators see. So the single most disputed thing at the end of a tenancy is the one thing you can settle before it becomes a fight. Do it once, do it to the report, and the deposit conversation is short.

That is the whole pitch.

Why is the clerk this thorough on Old Kent Road specifically? Because the deposit is real money the agent has to account for, and because a lot of the stock here is either brand-new and unforgiving or long-let and heavily worn. On a new flat the clerk is checking that the “as new” surfaces still read as new. On an older ex-council flat they are checking the places a decade of tenants never cleaned. Either way the inspection is genuinely adversarial. That is not the clerk being unfair. It just means you turn up with evidence rather than hope.

What 1 May 2026 changed for move-outs on the road

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every assured shorthold tenancy in England has rolled onto a periodic footing, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point in the year instead of waiting for a fixed term to end.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change one bit. The benchmark is still the check-in report. The deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing, and on Old Kent Road timing is already the thing that bites.

This corridor was churning fast before the Act. It is the biggest regeneration patch in inner south London, a two-mile brownfield stretch the GLA marked as an Opportunity Area, with the draft Area Action Plan planning something like 20,000 new homes and the towers arriving in waves. Tenants trade up into each new block as it completes, older tenancies turn over behind them, and the whole cycle runs quicker than it did three years ago. Let people leave on a rolling two months rather than a fixed date and the move-outs get more frequent and far harder to predict. The practical takeaway is dull but it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you think you need to, because the slot you want at month-end will already be gone if you wait.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change one bit.

The 57 things we run through, room by room

Every booking on this road runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over more than a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what Southwark clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job, and we will walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of the deposit goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks go into a soaking tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. On the ex-council flats near Burgess Park the extractor hood is the usual trap: oil mist off the wall behind the cooker, a filter clogged solid, and a light housing with baked grease inside a fiddly 1960s-spec cover. On the new blocks it is the other way around. Induction glass scratches if you go at it with a pad, so it is polished by hand. Quartz and the run of the worktop get wiped to the edge and the sealant bead at the back checked for grease. Every cupboard, inside and out, handles and hinges and plinths. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them, integrated units included. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under the fridge, washing machine and dishwasher are cleaned, then put back. And the washing machine itself: drum, detergent drawer out and scrubbed, and the door seal, which is one of the first things a clerk opens.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, spout, shower head, screen and tiles first, because the water here is genuinely hard and it sets fast. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: under the rim, the base, the cistern, the hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk does
• Shower screen both sides, the tracks, and the sealant bead at the base of it
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they come off the wall
• Extractor fan vent unclipped, blade dusted, cover wiped
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin

Bedrooms, living rooms and everything between

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, architrave, doors, handles and finger plates. Light switches, sockets, thermostats and intercoms, brass and chrome plates polished. Window glass on the inside, frames and cills wiped, the runners cleared of grit and the beads brushed where the property has them. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped for prints and scuffs, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and honest wear are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Hard floors washed with the right product for the material, whether that is the vinyl in an older flat or the engineered board in a post-2018 block. Carpets hoovered to the edge and stains spot-cleaned. Then a final walk-through, photographed room by room before and after, and that photo set is the evidence you keep.

Two jobs often need their own pass. Where a tenancy writes in professional carpet cleaning as a condition, the carpet cleaning add-on covers hot-water extraction on the same visit. Where a furnished let is handed back with the landlord’s sofa still in place, upholstery cleaning handles it rather than a hoover-over.

Very hard water, and what it does to a Peckham-end bathroom

The whole corridor sits in Thames Water’s supply, and that water is very hard: around 302 parts per million of calcium carbonate on Thames Water’s own figures, well into the top band. That one detail loses more deposits here than anything except the oven. Scale builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for it every time. They run a nail down the tap, they look at the screen edge-on against the light, they pull the shower head in close.

On a new-build the fittings are shiny and the scale shows against them, so a missed spout or a filmy screen reads as neglect. On an older flat the scale has often set into worn chrome, which rules out the harsh acid descalers that would strip what plating is left. We use a non-acid descaler that lifts the scale without wrecking rubber seals or chrome, and on the worst screens it goes on twice. Grout is the other one. It is the line between a pass and a deduction more often than anything to do with carpets, so we scrub it rather than wipe it, and where it is genuinely beyond saving we photograph the state before we start, so a clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in.

A dated photo of the grout has settled more disputes than any argument ever has.

Specialist surfaces sit outside the scrub-and-go work. Engineered board in a Ruby Triangle or Malt Street flat takes its own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for. Exterior glass on a low-floor flat where the inventory asks for it is a separate job too, handled by window cleaning folded into the same visit.

The road changes its stock every quarter mile

Old Kent Road is the old Roman route south, Watling Street on the maps, and it runs about two miles down the A2 from the Bricklayer’s Arms roundabout toward New Cross Gate. The housing changes character every few hundred yards, and a clerk knows which kind they are walking into before they press the buzzer. One clean does not pass all of it, so we work the road in three broad kinds of property.

The ex-council blocks and the estates behind them

Set back off the road are the older local-authority blocks and, west toward Walworth and Burgess Park, the Aylesbury Estate, a vast 1960s estate now being rebuilt by Notting Hill Genesis in phases that run to about 2032. Long tenancies here mean build-up in the places nobody cleaned between tenants: behind the cooker, under the fridge, into the window runners. We win these check-outs on the slow, dull work, not on anything clever. The kitchen extractor and the metal-framed window cills are where a clerk spends the extra minutes, and we plan the clean around that. If your hand-back is over the Walworth side, that patch has its own page at Walworth, with North Walworth next to it.

The Victorian side streets

Off the road toward the Peckham end you get the late-Victorian terraces broken into flats, on streets like Trafalgar Avenue and Lynton Road and around Commercial Way. Picture rails hold a grey fur of dust nobody knew was there, the grout behind the bath darkens within a year, and the sealant bead under the basin grows a black line no supermarket spray will shift. We had a fair example of this in the winter.

“Eighteen months in a first-floor flat split off Trafalgar Avenue, two of us plus a teenager sitting GCSEs. Acorn’s clerk had warned us at check-in the bathroom would be the deduction line, and she was dead right. The grout behind the bath was a black stripe by the time we left and the sealant under the basin had gone the same way. I’d tried a bleach pen and two rounds of mould remover, nothing shifted it. Monster came on a Thursday, two of them, raked the grout, laid a fresh sealant line the clerk could see was new, then took the scale off the screen. Passed with no cleaning deduction, full deposit back the week after.”
Sade, ex-tenant, Old Kent Road SE15, February 2026

Nearby, if your address is not on the road itself, we cover the fringes too: Peckham, Queens Road Peckham, Camberwell and South Bermondsey. Each is a different property mix, which is why they each get their own page rather than one borrowed clean.

The new towers on the road itself

Then the new-build waves. The Ruby Triangle, an Avanton scheme of more than a thousand flats on the wedge between Sandgate Street and Verney Road. Malt Street, Berkeley’s Bermondsey Place, up to 44 storeys and around 1,400 homes. The Cantium plot on the old retail park, a Galliard and Aviva scheme of a thousand more. The surfaces here are new but unforgiving, and the hand-backs are early: people trade up and move on quickly. Induction hobs, quartz, glass screens, integrated appliances, and building rules about lift bookings and loading bays that slow a move-out if you have not planned for them. Send us the operator’s spec sheet and we clean to it line by line.

“New one-bed in one of the Cantium blocks, corporate check-out sheet, first tenancy in the flat so everything was logged as new. I was paranoid about the induction hob and the shower screen. They cleaned it to the sheet, photographed the lot, and the managing agent signed it off same day. No fuss, no deduction.”
Marcus, tenant, Old Kent Road SE1, April 2026

Southwark licensing, and why an SE1 clerk looks twice

Southwark runs a landlord licensing regime that catches most of this corridor, and it feeds straight into how thorough a clerk is on a hand-back. A second selective licensing scheme came into force on 1 November 2023 covering fourteen named wards, and Old Kent Road ward is one of them, alongside North Walworth, Peckham, Peckham Rye, Nunhead and Queens Road, South Bermondsey and the rest. On top of that, borough-wide additional licensing has applied to smaller shared houses since March 2022 and runs to February 2027.

What this means in practice is simple. A licensed property has to meet the council’s standards at the start of every let, cleanliness included, so the clerk walking a licensed hand-back is checking against the bar the licence sets as well as the tenancy clause. Southwark’s own licensing pages spell out those standards for landlords. In our experience an SE1 clerk on a licensed flat is noticeably harder on bathroom mould, extractor hygiene and window cills than the same clerk would be on an unlicensed flat in a looser borough. We clean to the licensing bar, which is the higher one.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until it is too late

Old Kent Road runs at our standard south London pricing. No premium here, no call-out fee, no weekend supplement, and the price includes kit, products and travel. The figures below assume a flat in normal lived-in shape.

Carpet shampoo is an add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. Oven add-ons run £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household or a flat that has not had a deep clean in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after.

No surprise lines on the invoice.

Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect a deposit capped at five weeks’ rent, which on this road is a serious figure, is not really a decision. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags a cleaning item within 48 hours, we come back and put it right free, as long as you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate across these jobs sits near 97%, but the guarantee is the real point, because a failed check-out is not a small thing to shrug off. There is a reason the agents on this road know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

Four different cleans people muddle up

Booking the wrong one wastes money, so it is worth being clear which is which.

Check-in inventory report

The document a 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 vague idea of “clean”.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, done with the flat empty, priced at £30 an hour per cleaner and carrying the 48-hour re-clean guarantee.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping and living in. No formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing upkeep, the same cleaner kept on the home week to week. A domestic clean starts at £22 an hour.

Booking it around the month-end crush

Nearly every check-out on this road lands on the last two or three days of the month, and those slots go. Ring on the 29th for the 31st and you may be out of luck, so book early for month-end. The steps are short.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Give us the postcode, the bedroom count, the check-out date and any known problem areas. We quote in writing, usually within the hour in office time. If it is a new-build with a corporate sheet, send that too.
2. We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow 7 to 10 days for an end-of-month slot, 3 to 5 days mid-month.
3. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, belongings gone, rubbish cleared. If the move and the clean fall on one day, our removals team can take the load so the van trips do not clash with the clean.
4. We clean in a single visit, photograph every room before and after, and email the signed checklist to whoever booked it. Two or three cleaners, branded vans.
5. Check-out happens. Anything the clerk flags inside 48 hours, we come back and fix free.

One honest note on access. The new blocks want lift bookings and loading-bay slots, and the older estates can be tight for parking, so tell us the arrangement when you book, whether that is a concierge, a key safe or an agent drop-off. Sorting it in advance takes the sting out of the day.

“Two-bed ex-council flat off the road near Burgess Park, six years in it, so the kitchen had earned its keep. The extractor and the oven were the worry. Two cleaners, most of a day, and the letting agent released the deposit with no cleaning line at all. Wish I’d booked them for the previous flat too.”
Priya, ex-tenant, Old Kent Road SE1, March 2026

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning on Old Kent Road for a two-bed flat?

A two-bed is from £243, whether it is a terrace conversion off the Peckham end or a flat in one of the new blocks. That covers the full 57-point agent-approved checklist, all materials, and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee if the inventory clerk flags anything. There is no premium on this road and no call-out fee.

Do you cover the new blocks like Ruby Triangle, Malt Street and Cantium?

Yes, all of them, along with the older flats and the estates behind the road. New-build hand-backs bring their own traps, mainly induction hobs, quartz worktops and glass shower screens, and we price them at the same base tier as a comparable older flat. Send the managing agent’s check-out sheet with the booking and we clean to it point by point.

What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?

If the inventory clerk flags any cleaning item on the check-out report within 48 hours of our visit, we come back and put it right at no extra charge, as long as nobody has moved in. We have run this guarantee since 2014 and it sits behind our 97% first-time pass rate.

Is my flat covered by Southwark’s licensing scheme?

Very likely. Old Kent Road ward is inside Southwark’s second selective licensing scheme, in force since 1 November 2023, and borough-wide additional licensing covers smaller shared houses to February 2027. It does not change your clean, but it does mean the clerk checks cleanliness against the council’s standard as well as your contract, and we clean to that standard.

What is the water like, and why does it matter for my deposit?

Very hard. The corridor is on Thames Water’s supply at around 302 parts per million of calcium carbonate, so limescale on taps, shower screens and tile joints is one of the most common deduction lines here. We lift it with a non-acid descaler that does not strip rubber seals or chrome plating.

Can you clean at short notice on Old Kent Road?

Usually. Tenancies turn over fast on this road, faster since the Renters’ Rights Act let people leave on rolling notice, so we keep weekday slots open for short-notice jobs. Month-end is the crunch, so ring as early as you can for the last few days of the month.

Do I have to be there during the clean?

No. The agent or landlord can let us in, or we can collect keys from the letting office. We email completion photos and the signed checklist to whoever booked the clean, so you do not need to be on site.

Does the price include carpet cleaning?

No, carpet shampoo is a separate add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. Most tenancies do not need it unless the inventory specifically calls for professional extraction, and we will tell you honestly whether yours does.

How long does an Old Kent Road clean take?

A one-bed is usually four to five hours with two cleaners. A two-bed sits around five to seven. A three-bed terrace or ex-council flat can run to a full working day. We do not rush a job to fit a slot, because a rushed clean is how the deduction sneaks back in.

Do you charge a call-out fee or a weekend rate?

No. The prices on this page are what you pay, weekday or weekend, and there is no call-out fee or premium for the area.

Is the team insured and DBS-checked?

Yes. Every cleaner is DBS-checked, uniformed and covered under our public liability policy, and works to the same 57-point checklist whatever the property type.

What if the agent inspects a few days after I hand the keys back?

Most agents on this road inspect within about three working days of the keys going back. The 48-hour re-clean guarantee runs from our visit, so as long as the booking is logged inside that window and the flat is untouched, we still cover anything the clerk flags.