The ground, the gasholders and the streets behind them
Walk out of Oval station and the first thing you see is the wall of the cricket ground. The Kia Oval has been the home of Surrey County Cricket Club since 1845, it staged the first Test match played in England in September 1880, and the famous defeat by Australia here in 1882 is the match that gave cricket the Ashes. Behind the Vauxhall End stand the gasholders, the great wrought-iron frames that have formed the backdrop to the ground for well over a century. The largest, No. 1, was the biggest gasholder in the world when it went up and is now Grade II listed. The gasworks closed years ago, and the whole site beside the ground is being rebuilt into flats marketed as Oval Village, with the listed frame kept and homes built inside it.
That is the Oval most people picture. The Oval we actually work in is the few streets behind all that, and they are older and quieter than the ground suggests. A short walk from the turnstiles you reach Cleaver Square, laid out in 1789 on what was then open pasture and the earliest residential square built south of the river. Its three-storey yellow stock-brick terraces with their semi-basements still stand, the middle is gravelled rather than gardened, people play petanque on it in the summer, and the Prince of Wales sits in one corner. It is one of the most handsome corners of south London, and the flats carved out of those houses are exactly the kind that get a hard look from an inventory clerk.
One thing worth clearing up, because it confuses people and it confuses the post. The cricket ground and the tube station are technically in the SE11 postcode, while a chunk of the residential Oval, the part that shades west towards South Lambeth, carries an SW8 postcode. Letting particulars use both, sometimes for flats on the same street. None of that changes the clean or the council. This is the Lambeth Oval around the ground and the tube, and we cover all of it to the same checklist, whichever postcode the agent has written on the tenancy.
Just east of the station is Kennington Park, the old Kennington Common where the Chartists held their great rally in 1848 before the common was railed off and turned into one of London’s first public parks. It is the green lung of the area, the place the streets back onto, and it is a useful marker for us: a tenant who says they are on the park side of the ground has narrowed the flat down to a handful of roads before they have even given us the postcode. The point of all this geography is that Oval is small, dense and walkable, and the flats sit cheek by jowl, old next to new, grand next to plain.
A real mix of housing on a few streets
Oval does not have one kind of home. It has four or five, sometimes on the same road, and the clean changes with each.
There are the Georgian and early Victorian terraces, the yellow-brick houses round Cleaver Square and along the roads off Kennington Park Road, most of them long since split into flats with high ceilings, original sash windows and the awkward corners that come with a period conversion. There are the red-brick mansion blocks, including the eight blocks of Oval Mansions hard up against the ground, the sort of solid Edwardian flats that turn over steadily as one set of professional sharers replaces the last. There is a lot of council housing, most visibly the Kennington Park Estate, twelve five-storey blocks the old London County Council put up in the 1930s, much of it now sublet privately. And there is the new build, the glass-and-render Oval Village flats on the gasworks site, let furnished and turning over fast.
Why does the type of flat matter to a cleaner? Because each one fails a checkout in its own way. A period conversion hides dirt in the cornicing, the sash boxes and the gaps in old floorboards. A mansion-block flat has a tiled bathroom and a galley kitchen that have seen forty tenants and show every one. A council-built flat tends to be plainer but often older inside, with paint and grout that take work. A new build is judged against a showroom-perfect inventory and punishes the smallest smear. We have cleaned all of them around here, more times than I can count, and we price and plan the job around the flat in front of us rather than running one method at everything.
The other constant is churn. This is a young, mobile part of London, full of people who took the flat for a job or a course and move on after a year or two, which means a lot of checkouts, a lot of inventories and a lot of deposits on the line. Agents here are busy and they inspect quickly, because the next tenant is usually waiting. That tempo is the backdrop to everything below.
Selective licensing, and why it helps you
Here is the single most useful thing a tenant in Oval can know, and most do not. Lambeth has rolled selective licensing out across most of the borough, and the Oval ward was brought into the scheme on 1 September 2025. In plain terms, that means a landlord letting an ordinary flat here, to a single household or to no more than two unrelated sharers, has to hold a licence from the council. It is not optional, and it is not a formality.
Most tenants here have no idea this changed.
What makes this genuinely Oval rather than generic is the boundary. The scheme covers the Oval, Kennington, Myatt’s Field, Stockwell and Larkhall wards, but it deliberately leaves out Vauxhall and Waterloo. So a flat by the ground needs a selective licence while the same flat a short walk north in Vauxhall does not. Same street, same kind of flat, two different rulebooks within a ten-minute walk. People who rent on the fringe of the area assume the rules are the same everywhere and they are not, and on a deposit dispute that assumption can cost them.
Same street, same kind of flat, two different rulebooks within a ten-minute walk.
Separate from all that, if you share a house with people you are not related to, the place may also be a house in multiple occupation, which carries its own licence on top. The government explains what counts as a house in multiple occupation and when a licence is needed. The reason any of this belongs on a cleaning page is simple. When a landlord holds the right licence and runs things properly, a checkout tends to be clean and businesslike. When the paperwork is missing, deductions get used as a bargaining chip, and a tenant who knows the flat should have been licensed is in a far stronger position. You can confirm whether your flat is covered on the Lambeth selective licensing page rather than taking my word for it.
Why an Oval flat fails a checkout
The deductions are nearly always for the same handful of things. After years of doing this on these streets, I could almost write the clerk’s notes before they do.
The oven comes first, every time. A flat that has been let for two or three years has been lived in hard, and the inventory it is measured against was written when it was empty and immaculate. The oven looks fine from the front and is baked hard inside, the racks are stained, the door glass is cloudy with grease, and in a fitted kitchen the thing cannot be swapped out, so it has to be stripped and cleaned in place. It is the most common single reason an Oval deposit takes a hit, and it is entirely avoidable.
Limescale is the next one, because London water is hard and south London is no exception. A shower screen clouds with scale in weeks, the basin and bath taps fur up, the kettle and the tiles round the sink dull over. A clerk spots it at a glance. We strip it with proper acid-based products rather than a hopeful spray, and clean the grout and the silicone back to a colour instead of leaving it grey.
Then there are the period-flat traps. The original sash windows that so many of these conversions still have are beautiful and a nuisance to clean, with dust and dead flies collected in the boxes and the glazing bars; a clerk opens them and looks. Skirting and picture rails in a high-ceilinged room gather dust along their tops where nobody dusts day to day. Old timber floors hide grime in the gaps. None of it is hard, but all of it has to be done, because the report lists the lot.
A flat that has been let for two or three years has been lived in hard, and the inventory it is measured against was written when it was empty and immaculate.
New-build flats fail differently, and harder. On the Oval Village side the glass runs floor to ceiling and shows every smear when the afternoon light comes in, the cooling vents fur up with dust you never notice, and the inventory was taken when the flat was perfect, so the comparison is merciless. And almost every flat round here, old or new, has had carpet take a beating in the high-traffic rooms or a sofa that has earned its keep. Where the carpet or the upholstery has had a hard tenancy, that is where the deposit quietly leaks, and it is the easiest thing to put right before a clerk ever arrives.
Furnished lets add a layer that catches people out. A lot of flats round here come furnished, especially the mansion-block and new-build ones, and the inventory then lists every piece: the sofa, the dining chairs, the bed frame, the mattress, even the curtains. A clerk checks each item against its photograph, so a marked mattress or a sofa that has soaked up a year of evenings becomes a line on the schedule just as surely as a dirty oven does. We clean the soft furnishings the inventory names, not just the hard surfaces, because on a furnished tenancy that is half of what is being judged.
The 57-point clean, and what stands behind it
We clean to a fixed list. Every flat, the same 57-point checklist, built from the schedules that letting agents and inventory clerks in this part of London actually use at handover. It is not our idea of clean and it is not a tidy-up. It is the document the person inspecting your flat will be holding, and working to their list rather than ours is the main reason the job passes as often as it does.
And it does pass. Our first-time pass rate sits at 97%, which on a patch of fussy agents and quick inspections is a figure we are quietly proud of. The other three times in a hundred a clerk queries something, and that is exactly what the guarantee is for. If the agent or the inventory clerk challenges the standard, we come back and put it right under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee, at no charge. You never pay twice for one checkout.
The reason we can stand behind that is the work already done. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, the people who actually decide whether a deposit comes back, and over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That number is not invented for a brochure. It is the running total of money that stayed with tenants because a flat passed its checkout instead of failing it.
A word on what the list covers, since people ask. Every room, top to bottom. The kitchen gets the oven inside and out, the hob, the extractor, every cupboard inside and out, the splashbacks, the sink and taps descaled and the floor washed into the corners. The bathroom gets the limescale stripped, the grout and silicone cleaned, the screen and tiles done, the extractor and chrome polished and the loo sanitised. Living rooms and bedrooms get the floors, the skirting, the glass and the tracks, the doors, the switches and the cobwebs. Then the bits people forget, the top of the wardrobe, the back of every door, the airing cupboard. The clerk checks those, so we clean those.
What we ask from you is small. The flat needs electricity and running hot water on the day, everything you own out, and the fridge-freezer defrosted and switched off. After that it is ours. We bring the products, the machines and the list, and we stay until the list is done, however long it takes, because the team is priced by the flat and not by the hour. That is deliberate. An hourly clean gives a crew every reason to drag a job out; a price by the flat gives them every reason to finish it properly.
Getting a van onto these streets
The crews get here easily. The van is the headache. That is the honest summary of working in Oval.
Reaching the place is no trouble at all. Oval is on the Northern line, which is worth a footnote of its own, since the station opened in 1890 as part of the City and South London Railway, the first deep-level electric tube anywhere in the world. Kennington and Vauxhall are a short hop for other lines, and the 36, 185 and 436 buses run along the main roads. Most of our cleaners come in on public transport and barely think about it.
Parking is the part that needs planning, and it is genuinely awkward here. The older streets round Cleaver Square and off Kennington Park Road sit in a conservation area with controlled parking, the bays are mostly permit or pay-by-app, and space is tight on a normal day. On a match day at the Kia Oval it is worse, because a Test or a one-dayer brings crowds, closes roads and fills every bay for streets around, so if your checkout lands on a big fixture we plan around it. We drop the kit, sort the parking properly and move the van rather than leaving it across a resident’s space or a loading bay.
The buildings vary. A Georgian conversion is a walk-up with no lift and a narrow stair, which is fine but slower for carrying machines and water to a top-floor flat. A mansion block or one of the newer Oval Village buildings may have a porter, a service entrance or a goods lift, and on those a quick heads-up that a cleaning crew is coming makes the day run smoother. Tell us the building and the floor when you book and we will sort the access side out, because on these streets that single detail often decides how long the job takes.
What a clerk can and cannot deduct
There is a lot of myth around deposits, so here is the plain version, the same on every street in the ward.
Your deposit has to be held in a government-backed tenancy deposit protection scheme, and at the end of the tenancy a landlord can only charge for cleaning where the flat has not been returned to the standard recorded in the check-in inventory, with fair wear and tear set aside. That is the whole test. A landlord cannot keep money simply because they would like the place cleaned again, and they cannot charge you to bring a tired flat up to a better state than it was in when you arrived.
One point catches Oval tenants out a lot, because agents on these blocks still slip it into contracts. A clause that demands you pay for professional cleaning regardless of the state you leave the flat in is an unfair term, and it is not enforceable. Shelter puts it plainly: you only have to return the flat as clean as it was when you moved in, no more. We are asked for a cleaning receipt often, and we are happy to give one, but you are buying the result, not a piece of paper to wave at an agent.
The law shifted recently, too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 changed a great deal about how tenancies run, but it did not change the cleaning test one bit. Leave the flat as you found it, allowing for honest wear, and there is nothing to deduct. If a deduction does land and you think it is unfair, the deposit scheme runs a free dispute service, and a clean done to the inventory with a receipt behind it is the strongest hand you can hold.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photographs taken the day you moved in, recording the state of every room. Your checkout is judged against this, so the cleaner the flat was at the start, the higher the bar at the end.
- Schedule of dilapidations
- The list an agent or clerk draws up of anything they say falls short at checkout, cleaning included, with a cost beside each line. This is what comes out of your deposit if the flat fails.
- Selective licensing
- A Lambeth scheme requiring most private lets in named wards to be licensed. The Oval ward is in it from 1 September 2025; Vauxhall and Waterloo are not.
- HMO licence
- A separate licence for a house in multiple occupation, a home shared by people from different households, on top of any selective licence.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full, inventory-led clean of an empty flat at the close of a let, aimed at the checkout standard. Different from a deep clean, which is about a lived-in home rather than a handover.
What it costs, and how to book us
We price by the size of the flat, agreed before we start, and the team stays until the 57-point list is done. On these streets that runs from a studio or one-bed at the lower end to a larger three-bed period flat or family house at the upper end. The rents here are high and deposits scale with them, so the clean is almost always a fraction of what a failed checkout would cost you. To get a price, tell us the postcode, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether the flat is furnished or empty. That is enough for a fixed quote with no visit. If the carpets or the oven need more than a standard clean, we will say so up front rather than spring it on you, and our prices page sets out how the room-counted pricing works.
Timing matters more here than people expect. Most tenancies end on the last day of the month, agents on this churn want to inspect fast and turn the flat round, and the days around month-end fill quickly. Book a few days ahead if you can. We would rather clean an empty flat the morning of your checkout, with the keys due back that afternoon, than be squeezed into a slot with no room to spare if a clerk wants a second look. The guarantee only helps if there is time to use it.
A standard end of tenancy clean covers the whole flat to the inventory, and a few jobs need a bit more. These are the extras people round here ask for most. If the carpets have had a hard tenancy, our carpet cleaning uses hot-water extraction to pull dirt out of the pile rather than just freshen the top. Tired sofas and a furnished flat’s soft furnishings get the same through our upholstery cleaning. A baked-in oven is worth our oven cleaning, where the removable parts come out and get cleaned separately. The outside of the glass, which we cannot always reach safely from inside an upper flat, is a job for our window cleaning team, and worn hard floors come up with our floor cleaning. If you want a lived-in flat brought back to life rather than a checkout clean, our deep cleaning and domestic cleaning services fit better, and if the move itself is the headache, we can help with removals too.
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 and a real person will talk it through, take the details, give you the price and book a team for a day that suits, weekends included, which is when plenty of checkouts actually happen. You can also use the contact form if you would rather put it in writing. For the full method behind a checkout clean across London, the end of tenancy cleaning hub covers it in detail.
If your move is only round the corner, we are on those streets too. We clean checkouts across Kennington and the Kennington Park estates, in the Georgian flats around Cleaver Square, over towards Vauxhall and the new towers at Nine Elms, across Stockwell and Larkhall, down into Brixton and Camberwell, and west into South Lambeth and Myatt’s Field. Same list, same guarantee, same fixed price by the room.
Oval end of tenancy questions
Is Oval in Lambeth, and does my landlord need a selective licence here?
Yes, Oval is part of the London Borough of Lambeth, in the Oval ward around the cricket ground and the tube. And yes, very likely. Lambeth brought in selective licensing across most of the borough, and the Oval ward came into the scheme on 1 September 2025, so an ordinary private let to a single household or up to two unrelated sharers needs a licence from the council. That matters to you as a tenant, because a landlord who has not licensed a flat that needed one is on the back foot in any deposit argument. Note that neighbouring Vauxhall and Waterloo are left out of the scheme, so the rules genuinely change within walking distance. You can check the position on the Lambeth selective licensing page.
How much does an end of tenancy clean in Oval cost?
We price by the size of the flat, not by the hour, so you get a fixed quote before we start and the team stays until the 57-point list is finished. Tell us the postcode, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether the place is furnished or empty, and we will give you a price over the phone with no inspection visit. A studio off Brixton Road sits at the lower end and a larger Georgian flat near Cleaver Square at the upper end. On a deposit the size most people leave around here, the clean is a small fraction of what a failed checkout would cost. For the wider picture you can also look at our prices page.
What exactly is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or the letting agent challenges our work at checkout, we come back and put it right under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee, at no extra charge. It backs up the 57-point checklist and our 97% first-time pass rate, and it means you are never left hiring a second cleaner on top of us if something gets queried after we have gone. It is also why we ask you to book with a little time in hand before the keys are due back, so there is room to use it if a clerk wants a second look.
Do you clean the flats in the new Oval Village development?
Yes. The towers and blocks going up on the old gasworks site beside the ground, marketed as Oval Village, are managed buildings with detailed inventories and a handover standard written into the lease, and we clean to whatever standard the building uses at checkout. New-build flats are unforgiving at a checkout, because the inventory was taken when the place was showroom-perfect and every mark shows against that. We clean the floor-to-ceiling glass and tracks, the comfort cooling vents, the integrated oven and hob and the wet rooms with that higher bar in mind.
Can my landlord still charge me for cleaning when I move out?
Only where the flat has not been returned to the standard recorded in your check-in inventory, with fair wear and tear set aside. Your deposit has to sit in a government-backed tenancy deposit protection scheme, and a landlord cannot simply keep money because they fancy the place cleaned again. A clause that demands professional cleaning whatever state you leave the flat in is an unfair term and is not enforceable, as Shelter sets out. A clean done to the inventory, with a receipt behind it, takes the argument off the table.
Do I need to be there, and what do you need on the day?
You do not have to be there, as long as we can get in and the keys for handover are sorted. The flat needs electricity and running hot water, because nobody can clean an oven or a wet room properly without either, everything you own should be out, and the fridge-freezer should be defrosted and switched off. In a mansion block or a managed building, a quick word with the porter that a cleaning crew is coming saves time. After that we bring the products, the machines and the checklist, and work straight to the inventory so the agent can inspect the moment we finish.
How do your cleaners reach Oval, and where do they park?
Getting a crew here is the easy part. Oval station on the Northern line is a couple of minutes away, Vauxhall and Kennington are close for other lines, and the 36, 185 and 436 buses run along the main roads. The van is the part that needs thought. Many of the older streets near Cleaver Square sit in a conservation area with controlled parking, the bays are mostly permit or pay-by-app, and match days at the Kia Oval close roads and fill every space for streets around. We plan loading around all of that, drop the kit and move the van rather than block a resident.
Can you do the oven, the carpets and the windows as well?
Yes, those are the usual extras and we book them in from the start so nothing is a surprise on the day. A baked-in oven gets stripped and cleaned in place through our oven cleaning, tired carpets get hot-water extraction with our carpet cleaning, and the inside of the glass and the frames are part of the standard clean, with the outside handled by our window cleaning team where it can be reached safely. Sofas and a furnished flat’s soft furnishings go through our upholstery cleaning. Tell us when you book and we will quote the lot together with the end of tenancy clean.