End of tenancy cleaning in and around Oval

The check-out, room by room

An inventory clerk works through the flat in a set order and compares each room with the photographs taken on the day you moved in. Here is where they look, and what it means in the homes round the Oval.

The clerk starts at the front door. In Oval Mansions and the other older blocks, your flat starts at the top of a shared stair. The clerk will not mark you down for the communal stairs, but they will check your own door, the frame, the letterbox, the light switch and the floor just inside, which carries the grit of every trip up those flights.

On the Ashmole Estate the deck-access blocks put your front door on an open walkway, so the door and window facing the deck pick up street dust and need washing down.

The kitchen comes next, and this is where most deductions start. The clerk opens the oven, the fridge and every cupboard, runs a finger along the top of the units and looks under the hob. In the older flats the kitchens are small and the cooker sits tight against the wall, so the gap beside it fills with grease.

In the new blocks the clerk looks for smears on gloss doors and on the induction hob, and for crumbs in the soft-close drawer runners. The oven is not part of the fixed price; it is an add-on at £31 for a single or a single wide oven, and £62 for a double or a 90cm range cooker.

Then the bathroom. Lambeth’s water comes from Thames Water, and the company describes its supply as hard: it takes up minerals from chalk and limestone, and leaves them behind on chrome and glass.

A clerk who sees white crust on the taps or a cloudy screen writes “requires cleaning”, whatever the state of the rest of the room. Our cleaners descale the taps, the shower head, the screen and the tiles as part of the clean, and scrub the grout and the sealant.

57The 57-point checklist Kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, living areas and hallway, room by room

In the living rooms and bedrooms of the Regency villas south of the station, ceilings are tall, so the dust sits on picture rails, cornices, the tops of doors and the deep sills of sash windows. In the new towers it is the floor-to-ceiling glass, the window tracks and the balcony door that get checked. Radiators, sockets, switches, skirting and the inside of every wardrobe are on every clerk’s list.

Last come the floors. Carpets are judged against the check-in photos. If your tenancy says carpets must be professionally cleaned, add them to the booking: £29 a bedroom, £36 a living room, £47 a through lounge, £35 a flight of stairs, £20 a hallway and £8 a landing.

All of this is on our 57-point checklist. The cleaners are vetted face to face, insured and trained on it, and if the agent or clerk raises anything within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no charge.

The homes round the cricket ground

The Oval is named after a street plan of 1790 that was never finished. The land was market gardens until 1844, when the Montpelier Cricket Club leased it from the Duchy of Cornwall; Surrey have played there since 1845. The area is part of Kennington, and its homes run across three postcodes, SE11, SW8 and SW9.

Oval Mansions is eight four-storey blocks built in the 1890s between the ground and the gasholders, first let to nurses and gasworks staff. Lambeth closed them as unsafe in 1979, squatters lived there from 1983 until 2000, and by 2003 the council had sold most of the flats. Most are now privately owned, many are let, and they are typical of the area’s older flats: small rooms, high ceilings and a long climb.

The Ashmole Estate, round Meadow Road and Claylands Road, was built over forty years from 1935, starting with London County Council neo-Georgian deck-access blocks and ending with two 18-storey towers, one of them Sirinham Point, in 1972 to 1974. Lambeth passed it to Metropolitan Housing Trust in March 2010.

South of the station, the Vassall Road conservation area keeps terraces and villas from the 1820s and 1830s, built once Vauxhall Bridge (1816) opened the area to the middle classes. The villas on the west side of Vassall Road are three storeys over a semi-basement, and many are now flats. Across Camberwell New Road the streets are in Southwark, so a move to Camberwell means a different council.

The newest homes are at Oval Village, Berkeley’s scheme of more than 1,300 homes on the old gasworks. The Grade II listed gasholder of 1879 is being fitted with almost 200 flats, topped out in May 2025 with residents due from 2028.

Match days, parking and getting in

The ground holds 27,500, and on major match days there are road closures around Kennington and Oval that can block some side streets; Surrey say there is no match-day parking at or near the ground.

If your check-out falls on a big match day, tell us when you book. Lambeth’s 24 controlled parking zones are mostly in the north of the borough, where the Oval is; if we have to pay for a bay, the charge goes on the quote at cost.

Oval station, opened in 1890 on the City and South London Railway, sits where Kennington Park Road, Camberwell New Road, Clapham Road and Harleyford Street meet, on the Northern line between Kennington and Stockwell. Thames Water is also renewing mains on 86 Lambeth roads until 2031, round Kennington and Vauxhall among others, so check for road works near you.

To book, send the postcode, block and floor, bedroom count, check-out date and any oven or carpets. The flat should be empty, with the power and hot water on. Month-end books up first, so a week’s notice helps. The rest of the borough is covered on our end of tenancy cleaning Lambeth page.