Old Street end of tenancy cleaning, the easy way

The check-out clerk at a City Road tower opens the run of glazing channels along the floor-to-ceiling windows before anything else, because that grey line of grime is the deduction they can photograph in ten seconds. Get that right and half the argument is over. So end-of-tenancy cleaning around Old Street has to be built for the person filling in the report: checklist-led, deposit-focused, billed at £30 per hour per cleaner, and backed by a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out itself. Monster Cleaning has worked EC1V since 2014, from the loft conversions off Tabernacle Street to the new towers on City Road. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the Old Street footprint across EC1V and EC1Y, the City Road stretch down to the Basin, and the streets west toward Bunhill and St Luke’s. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Islington.

How the check-in report quietly settles your deposit

Start with the document, because it is the whole game. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a report on every surface, usually with photos, usually with the words “clean to a professional standard” against the kitchen and bathroom. That was true on the day, because the flat had just been done. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are marked against a professional clean, which is exactly why a mop and a spare Saturday rarely gets you there.

The money is not abstract. On the Old Street DIY check-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a familiar shape: £80 to £120 on the oven, £70 to £150 on grout and tap scale, £60 to £100 for the gaps behind integrated appliances, and a nasty one almost unique to this pocket of London, £40 to £90 for dusty MVHR and extractor grilles in the tower flats. Put that against a deposit north of £2,000 and the sums make themselves. Most tenants run them only after they have failed the check-out and lost the first round, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win.

Why is the clerk so exacting here? Because the deposit is large and the agent is on the hook for protecting it. A five-week deposit on a City Road one-bed is real money somebody has to account for, so the inspection is adversarial. It means you turn up with evidence, not optimism, and the evidence is a dated photo set from a clean that matched the report.

You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a spare Saturday rarely gets you there.

Why a Silicon Roundabout clean is its own animal

Old Street is not Angel and it is not Clerkenwell. It centres on the rebuilt Old Street interchange, the junction everyone still calls Silicon Roundabout, where the £132m Transport for London works closed the north-west arm and dropped in a new public square above the Northern line station. Around it sit the tech towers and workspaces, the White Collar Factory on Old Street Yard among them, that pulled thousands of startup tenants into the postcode, and behind them a wall of new residential towers up City Road.

That mix produces two rental archetypes, cleaned differently. The first is the glass tower flat. The Atlas Building at 145 City Road runs to forty storeys of dual-aspect apartments with balconies, a pool and a spa; the Bezier at 91 City Road and the Lexicon and Eagle blocks by the Basin are cut from the same cloth. Floor-to-ceiling glazing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, integrated German appliances, concierge sign-in. The clerks on these buildings inspect the glazing channels, the vent grilles and the under-cabinet lighting, and a service-charged block expects the flat handed back at concierge grade.

The second is the warehouse or office-to-residential loft, the ex-commercial fabric off Tabernacle Street, Leonard Street and Paul Street carved into live-work flats and split-level apartments. Exposed brick, steel windows, poured or engineered floors, a mezzanine bedroom. These reward slow surface work rather than brute force, and the inventory names the quirks individually.

Both share one thing the wider borough does not: churn. This is company-let and young-professional territory, a lot of one-year tenancies tied to jobs that move, so the move-outs come thick and the agents run tight standards.

What 1 May 2026 changed for Old Street move-outs

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone. Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point in the year 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 check-in benchmark still applies. The deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing, and timing is what bites in a postcode like this one.

Old Street was already high-churn, full of short professional lets and corporate tenancies. Let tenants leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and the move-outs get more frequent and far less predictable, so the month-end pile-up that already clogs the area will not ease. The practical takeaway is dull but it pays for itself: book earlier than you used to, because the Friday and Saturday slots at the end of the month go first.

Where you stand on Islington licensing in EC1V

Most of EC1V sits in the London Borough of Islington, in the Bunhill and St Peter’s part of the borough, though the City of London and Hackney boundaries are close enough that a flat on the wrong side of a street can fall under a different council. It is worth knowing which regime yours is under, because a licensed property is inspected to a tighter line.

Islington runs a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme that started on 1 February 2026 and runs for five years. If your Old Street flat is a house in multiple occupation, meaning it is let to three or more people from more than one household who share a kitchen or bathroom, it needs an additional HMO licence, and that is most converted flat-shares in the warehouse blocks. Larger HMOs on three or more storeys need the mandatory licence on top. The council keeps a separate selective licensing scheme for single-family lets, but in October 2025 it extended that only to seven wards further north and west, and Bunhill is not one of them, so an ordinary single-household let in the core of EC1V does not need a selective licence today.

Why it matters for the clean: a licensed HMO is held to a condition standard between tenancies that the council can enforce by inspection, so the agent’s check-out on a shared flat runs a tighter kitchen, bathroom and shared-corridor line than a single let would. Islington’s own licensing pages block automated readers, so we tell tenants this in plain words rather than link a page that will not load.

End-of-tenancy clean

The hand-back clean, built to pass an inventory check-out and get a deposit back, with the flat empty and a 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it. Billed at £30 per hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A reset for a home you are keeping and living in, with no inventory to satisfy and no formal standard to hit. Also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance, same cleaner kept on the home, from £22 an hour on a weekly booking.

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 tidy.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

Every Old Street 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. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of the deposit goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped: racks in a soaking tank, the door glass split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all done. Hob and induction plate, control knobs off and washed. The extractor hood degreased inside and out, filter soaked or swapped. In the tower flats the same care goes into the MVHR intake, because that grille is a photographed line. Every cupboard inside and out. Fridge and freezer once you have defrosted them, and the integrated units in the Atlas and Bezier kitchens have their own quirks we already know. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind the fridge, dishwasher and washing machine are done, then put back. The washing machine drawer and door seal, dishwasher filter and spray arms, microwave inside and under. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled, because the water here never gives that a miss. Tiles and grout scrubbed. Floor mopped into the corners.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first, with the gentle approach on the polished chrome the newer blocks use, which rules out the harsh descalers you would throw at an old suite. Grout scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving. Then the rest:

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
• Shower screen both sides, tracks and the silicone bead at the tray included
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they lift off the wall
• Extractor or MVHR vent pulled, wiped and rinsed
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin

Bedrooms, living rooms and the glazing

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, door frames, doors, handles and finger plates. Light fittings, shades, switches, and in a loft conversion the run of exposed ductwork and track lighting that holds dust. Then the windows, where an Old Street clean earns its money: the sills, reveals and internal glass, and on a floor-to-ceiling tower flat the full run of glazing channels along the floor, which on a large apartment can take the best part of an hour on its own. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Hard floors washed with the right product for the material. Carpets vacuumed throughout, with hot-water extraction on quote.

Two jobs often need their own pass. Carpet shampoo books well on the warehouse conversions with fitted carpet over concrete; that is the carpet cleaning add-on on the same visit. The exterior face of the glass an inventory sometimes asks for is separate too, and that is window cleaning, folded into the booking when the report calls for it.

Then everything else: sockets, thermostats, intercoms and entryphones; internal doors both faces; cobwebs out of the ceiling corners. Then a final walk-through against the inventory, photographed before and after, every room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

What Thames Water does to a City Road bathroom

EC1V is a hard-water postcode on the Thames Water network, which draws from chalk and limestone under the Thames valley. Hardness here reads around 250 parts per million, near the top of the Thames Water hard band, and that one detail loses more deposits in this area than almost anything except the oven. Calcium builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for it: a thumbnail run down the tap, the shower screen held edge-on against the light.

Scale that has set into chrome is not a quick job, and in the newer City Road flats the fittings are usually polished or brushed metal that aggressive descalers would dull, so we plan around forty minutes of bathroom descaling per visit and use a solution that lifts the calcium without stripping silicone seals or the finish. Grout is the other one, the line between a pass and a deduction here more often than anything to do with carpets, and where it is genuinely past saving we photograph the state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already in the check-in pictures.

A dated photo of grout that was already grey on day one has settled more disputes than any argument has.

Old Street top to bottom: the stock changes street by street

The area is small, but the housing swings hard from one street to the next, and one method does not pass all of it. We work it in three bands.

The City Road towers

North of the junction, City Road is now a line of residential high-rises: the Atlas Building, the Bezier, and the Lexicon and Eagle blocks around the City Road Basin on the Regent’s Canal. These come with corporate inventory checklists stricter than most private landlords bother with, sometimes a communal lounge written into the check-out scope. Send us the operator’s spec sheet and we clean to it line by line. Nearby you can also pick City Road Basin and Angel up the road.

The warehouse and office lofts

East and south of the roundabout, toward the Shoreditch fringe, the fabric is ex-commercial: warehouse-to-loft and office-to-residential conversions off Leonard Street, Paul Street and Pitfield Street. Long-run dust settles on ductwork and steel that nobody cleaned between lets, and the clerks working this stock know exactly where to point the torch. We win these on the slow work, not on anything clever. Clerkenwell next door has a lot of the same.

The older streets west toward Bunhill

West of the junction the stock is older and mixed: period flats and the streets running toward Bunhill Fields, the burial ground where Daniel Defoe and William Blake lie, and on toward the St Luke’s parish around Mitchell Street. Picture rails, the odd original cornice and stripped boards turn up here, and they get a careful damp cloth rather than a soak. Finsbury and St Luke’s sit right alongside.

Not sure which council your flat falls under, with the City and Hackney boundaries so close? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds.

What it costs, and the maths nobody runs in time

Old Street runs at our standard London pricing, billed in advance and fixed for the booking unless the property is materially different to the inventory. These are full prices, not a promotion, with kit, products and travel included.

Add-ons where a tenancy asks for them: carpet shampoo £36 per bedroom, £43 per living room, £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed; oven cleans £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a 90cm range. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household or somewhere not deep-cleaned in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. No surprise lines on the invoice.

Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect a deposit above £2,000 is not really a decision. Every Old Street booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside that window and the flat is still as we left it with nobody moved in. Our pass rate across Islington jobs sits at a 97% first-time pass rate, but the guarantee is the point, because a failed check-out where deposits start north of £2,000 is not a small thing to shrug off. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions: money that stays with the tenant instead of the landlord.

A Tabernacle Street job from February

“Three years in a warehouse-conversion one-bed off Tabernacle Street, mezzanine bedroom, steel Crittall windows the whole length of the living space. I move for the commute, not the rent, and I knew the glazing channels were going to be the fight because I had never once cleaned them properly. The letting agent had them marked on the check-in pack. Two cleaners came on a Thursday, six hours, took the steel window channels apart section by section and got the black grime out, then descaled the bathroom chrome without touching the finish. The clerk passed it the next morning and I had £1,850 of the £2,000 deposit back inside a fortnight.”
Priya, ex-tenant, Old Street EC1V, February 2026

That job is a fair example of the pattern down here: a loft with a feature the inventory names specifically, a surface the tenant has never deep-cleaned, and an agent who checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake. It usually does. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, the part most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Questions we get asked

How much is end-of-tenancy cleaning around Old Street?

From £156 for a studio at the Bezier or an Atlas studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed apartment or duplex. By the hour it is £30 per cleaner. Prices include the 57-point agent-approved checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, and they are full prices, not a discounted rate.

Do you clean inside the Atlas Building and the Bezier?

Yes. The glass towers on City Road are some of our most-cleaned EC1V flats. We sign in at concierge, and the full-height glazing in the Atlas and the studios and one-beds in the Bezier are exactly the property types this page is built around. Send the operator’s inventory sheet and we clean to it.

Why does an Old Street clean cost more attention than a normal flat?

The glazing channels on floor-to-ceiling windows and the mechanical ventilation grilles in the tower flats are two lines the clerks here photograph that you simply do not get in an ordinary flat. Both take real time. On a large apartment the glazing run alone can take close to an hour, which is why we plan the job around it rather than treating it as an afterthought.

What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?

If your agent’s clerk flags anything inside 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no charge. The flag has to be itemised against the inventory and tied to the original scope, and the flat has to be as we left it with nobody moved in. We will re-clean any line we missed.

What is your first-time pass rate at Old Street?

Across our Islington bookings we run at a 97% first-time pass rate. The small number of callbacks are usually a glazing channel or a vent grille missed under time pressure on a same-day move-out, which the re-clean guarantee then covers.

Will you use products that are safe for engineered floors and polished chrome?

Yes. Warehouse conversions off Leonard Street and Paul Street often have engineered or poured floors, and the newer City Road flats have polished or brushed metal fittings. We use a fine microfibre and the right product on those floors, never a wet mop, and a scale solution that lifts calcium without dulling the chrome finish.

Do I need an HMO licence, and does it change the clean?

If your Old Street flat is shared by three or more people from more than one household, it needs an additional HMO licence under Islington’s borough-wide scheme that started in February 2026. It does not change the clean itself, but a licensed HMO is inspected to a tighter condition standard between lets, so the kitchen, bathroom and any shared corridor get a closer check-out. An ordinary single-household let in the core of EC1V does not currently need a selective licence.

Do you have public liability insurance?

Yes, we carry public liability cover for every clean, including high-floor work in the City Road towers. We can email the certificate to your letting agent before the booking if they ask for it.

Can I book at short notice?

Most weeks yes, even same-day for studios and one-beds. Friday and Saturday slots at the end of the month fill first, because that is when most of the Old Street company lets cycle, so those windows want a few days’ notice.

Do you work directly with letting agents around Old Street?

We work with 300+ letting agents nationally, and around Old Street that includes the agents handling the City Road tower lettings and the independents on the warehouse and loft stock. We send the work order and the before-and-after photo pack straight to the agent the same evening.

How does parking work around the roundabout?

Most of EC1V sits in an Islington controlled parking zone during weekday hours, and the south side of the junction can be the City of London or Hackney depending on which arm you are on. We carry visitor permits for the team and bill the cost through the booking, and the towers on City Road have loading bays we can use with concierge approval.

How do you handle the Thames Water hard-water marks here?

Hardness reads around 250 parts per million on the Thames Water network at this postcode. We use a non-acid scale solution on chrome and tile that does not strip silicone seals or dull polished fittings, and we plan about forty minutes of bathroom descaling per visit. Scale around the taps and the shower screen is the single most photographed deduction line in the area.

Can I get my deposit back if my landlord disputes the clean?

If the clean is on our 57-point checklist and the agent’s photo pack flags a line we covered, we send the work order, the before-and-after photos and the team’s sign-off straight to the deposit scheme. The Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits and the DPS all accept that evidence as part of an adjudication, and Shelter’s guidance walks through the steps.

What if my flat is south of the roundabout in Hackney or the City?

Same crew, same checklist, same price. The boundary changes which council and licensing scheme applies, but the clean and the deposit scheme run identically. We just ask for the agent’s full address on booking so we can match the inventory.

Booking it, and getting a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, property size, check-out date and any known problem areas, that is the lot. Out of hours, send us a message or email [email protected] and someone calls you back first thing. A couple of photos of the kitchen, bathroom and windows sharpen the quote, which matters most on the bigger tower flats and warehouse lofts. We confirm the slot, clear concierge where you need it, and email the photo pack to your agent the same evening.