The ground West Ham grew out of
The football club that fills the London Stadium up the road was born a few streets from where you are standing. Thames Ironworks FC, the works team from the shipyard down by Bow Creek, moved to a new sports ground in Plaistow in 1897 and played here as Thames Ironworks, then from 1900 as West Ham United, until they left for the Boleyn Ground in 1904. The Memorial Grounds opened on Jubilee Day, 22 June 1897, for the sixtieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the land survives today as the Memorial Recreation Ground, a public park off Memorial Avenue near West Ham station. Most people renting in E13 walk past it without knowing the Hammers started there.
Here is the short version for anyone mid-move and short of time. We clean rented homes in Plaistow to inventory standard, priced by the size of the property rather than by the hour, with a free re-clean inside 48 hours if the inventory clerk objects. That is the deal. The rest of this page is about why the clean decides the deposit on these particular streets.
Plaistow is terraces, mostly. Long rows of Victorian and Edwardian houses went up here in the 1880s and 1890s once the railway arrived, built for dockworkers and tradespeople, and a great many of them are now let by the room or as whole-house shares. That housing stock is the thing that shapes a check-out in E13, and it cleans nothing like the new towers a mile south at Canning Town.
Terraces built for the docks, and how they clean
Plaistow station opened on 31 March 1858, put in by the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway, and the terraces followed the line. By the 1890s the streets either side of Greengate Street and the High Street were rows of two-storey brick houses thrown up fast for the men working the Royal Docks and the Thames Ironworks. The District and Hammersmith and City lines run through the station now, in Zone 3, between West Ham one stop west and Upton Park one stop east, and the same houses are still here. Most have been split into flats or let whole to sharers.
A Victorian terrace catches tenants out at the end of a tenancy in ways a new flat never would. The skirting boards are deep and moulded, and dust sits along the top of them where nobody looks until a clerk runs a finger across. Picture rails, cornices and ceiling roses collect cobwebs in the corners of high rooms. The sash windows, where the originals survive, have runners and glazing bars that trap grime, and the bay window at the front has more glass and more frame than people allow for. Floors are often the original boards or a later laminate, and the gaps between boards hold years of grit.
Then there is the part of an old house that decides most deposits. Kitchens in these terraces are usually a back addition, a narrow galley built onto the rear, and the cooker sits in a tight run where grease climbs the wall and the underside of the units. Bathrooms are small and often a later conversion, tiled in a hurry, and the grout holds mould and the taps fur up on hard east London water. The boiler cupboard, the airing cupboard, the cupboard under the stairs, every terrace has these and every one gets checked.
Damp is the other thing. A lot of these houses have a degree of rising or penetrating damp in the back rooms and the kitchen, and tenants reach for bleach on the black spots the week they leave. That can make a patch worse, not better, and a clerk knows the difference between mould a tenant has cleaned and mould a tenant has smeared. We treat it properly rather than painting over it.
Who rents here is a particular mix, and Newham is the most ethnically diverse borough in the country, with around 69 per cent of residents recorded as not white at the 2021 census and no single group a majority. A good share of Plaistow lets are large family houses and a good share are sharer houses full of people who came for the cheaper rents and the quick run into the City. Both turn over often. The family houses move on the school year, the sharer houses move whenever a tenancy ends, and either way the house comes back to an agent who measures it against a check-in report.
A clerk knows the difference between mould a tenant has cleaned and mould a tenant has smeared.
What a clerk marks first in an E13 terrace
Every end of tenancy job we run works off a 57-point checklist built around what letting agents and inventory clerks actually write down. It is not a tidy-up list. It is the document the person inspecting your house is effectively holding, room by room, against the inventory taken the day you moved in, and that report decides the job, not how clean the place looks to you on the morning you hand the keys over.
Clerks are predictable about where they look first, and in an old Plaistow terrace the order is its own thing. The oven goes first, because a half-cleaned oven is the quickest deduction in the world to justify with one photo. Then the grease behind and above the hob in that narrow back kitchen, because it climbs the wall in a galley and a clerk knows to look up. Then the bathroom: the grout, the sealant round the bath, the limescale on the taps and the shower screen. Then the bay and the windows, inside and along the runners. Then the things nobody thinks about day to day, the deep skirting, the picture rails, the tops of doors, behind the loo, the cupboard under the stairs.
The checklist breaks the house down room by room. The kitchen carries the most points: oven inside and out, hob and extractor, cupboards and drawers done on both faces, worktops and splashbacks, the sink and taps descaled, the floor washed into the corners. Bathrooms come down to the grout and sealant, the limescale, the toilet inside and behind, the basin, the bath or shower tray and the tiles. Bedrooms and the front room are wardrobes and drawers wiped through, the deep skirting and the picture rail, frames, doors, handles and switches, marks lifted off the walls where they will lift, and the floors. Then the things that run through the whole house: cobwebs out of the high corners, light fittings, the insides of the windows, the bannister and the stairs.
An old house adds work a new flat never has. There is simply more surface, more moulding, more frame, more cupboard, and dust settles on all of it. The bay window alone takes longer than a flat’s whole glazing. We clean the runs people forget, the back of the kitchen door, the gap behind the cooker, the windowsill under the bay, because those are exactly the lines a clerk writes up.
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, which is the only reason any of this runs the way it does. We already know what the agents handing back Plaistow and wider Newham houses expect to see, so we clean to that report rather than to a vague idea of clean. Across the homes we hand back, the first-time pass rate is 97%, and the small share that get challenged usually come down to a clerk and a tenant reading wear and tear differently.
If a clerk or the agent challenges the work, we come back and re-clean the disputed items free within 48 hours. You do not pay twice, and you are not left arguing a deduction on your own. People underrate that until they need it, because a check-out sometimes lands days after the cleaner has gone and memories get conveniently short.
Your deposit, the rules and the paperwork
Start with the rule that is on your side. Your deposit has to be held in a government-approved scheme, and your landlord or agent must protect it within 30 days of taking it, as gov.uk sets out. If yours was never protected, that changes the whole conversation about deductions before you spend a penny, so check that first.
The odds are kinder than people fear. Only a small fraction of deposits ever reach a formal dispute, but among the ones that do, cleaning is the single biggest cause. So the realistic risk is not a dramatic stand-off. It is a quiet line on the check-out report, a cleaning charge skimmed off the top, and most tenants letting it go because arguing feels like more bother than the money is worth. A proper clean takes that line off the table.
What a landlord can actually keep is narrower than many assume. They need a genuine reason, and Citizens Advice is clear that they cannot charge you for reasonable wear and tear, the gradual ageing of paint, flooring and fittings over a tenancy. In an old terrace there is plenty of genuine wear, a worn stair carpet, paint gone tired in a hallway, and a clerk should write that off as age. What they will not write off is dirt. A greasy kitchen, a scaled-up bathroom and dusty skirting are cleaning, not wear, and the deduction for them is easy to justify. Shelter’s guidance is the plain-English version worth reading before you hand the keys back.
Two pieces of paper settle most disputes: the check-in inventory from the day you arrived, and the check-out report at the end. If you can show the house left as clean as it looks in the check-in photos, you are most of the way home, and a professional cleaning receipt sits alongside those as evidence the work was done to standard. Dig out your check-in report before the clean so you know what you are being measured against.
If a deduction does come and you think it is unfair, you do not have to accept it. Every protection scheme runs a free dispute service, where an independent adjudicator weighs the evidence and decides, but the catch is the clock, so do not sit on it. The landlord has to prove the deduction is fair, not the other way round, which is why a clean house with a receipt and dated photos so often ends with the money coming back. Photograph the place yourself on the way out, with the date showing.
The law underneath all this has just shifted. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 is reshaping private renting in England, ending the old assured shorthold and the Section 21 route, with the main provisions phasing in through 2026. Deposit-protection duties carry on through that change, and a clean, well-evidenced check-out only gets more useful as the rules tighten. Over the years our cleans have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and the pattern never changes: the report says professionally cleaned, and the deduction does not stick.
A few of the words that get thrown around at this point are worth pinning down.
- Deposit protection scheme
- A government-approved scheme that holds your deposit safely for the length of the tenancy. There are three in England, and your landlord must use one and tell you which, with the rules set out on gov.uk.
- Check-in inventory
- The dated record, usually with photos, of a property’s condition and cleanliness on the day you moved in. It is the document every check-out is measured against, so in an old terrace the photos of the kitchen and bathroom matter most.
- Reasonable wear and tear
- The normal ageing of paint, flooring and fittings through ordinary use. A landlord cannot bill you for it, only for damage or for cleaning below the standard you were given the house in.
- End of tenancy clean vs deep clean
- An end of tenancy clean is done to inventory standard for handing a property back. A deep clean is a one-off reset for a home you are staying in. The end of tenancy version is judged against a check-out report, which is the difference that counts.
A greasy kitchen, a scaled-up bathroom and dusty skirting are cleaning, not wear, and the deduction for them is easy to justify.
Every let in Plaistow needs a licence
This is the part that sets Plaistow apart from most of London, and most tenants have no idea it applies to them. Newham has run borough-wide property licensing for years, and the current scheme is its third five-year term. Almost every privately rented home in the borough needs a licence, the shared ones and the ordinary single-household houses and flats alike, Plaistow included. There are only two wards left out of it, Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park, and Plaistow is in none of the exemptions.
The detail breaks into two schemes. The council’s selective licensing designation, the one that covers ordinary single-household lets, runs from 1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028 and reaches every ward except those two, including Plaistow North, Plaistow South and Plaistow West and Canning Town East. Alongside it the borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme, which covers smaller shared houses, runs from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2027 over the same wards. Whichever your house falls under, the licence puts it on the council’s radar, and landlords here watch the condition of a property at change-over closely because of it.
Why this matters for your deposit is simple. A licensed landlord is being held to a standard by the council, so they tend to be stricter about how a house comes back, and they lean on the check-out report to keep it that way. The clean has to stand up. You can check whether a property is correctly licensed and read the terms on the council’s own rented property licensing pages, which is worth doing if you have any doubt your landlord did it.
Here is a plain-English version of the licensing terms that come up in Plaistow.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme that licenses ordinary single-household lets, the kind that share no facilities. Newham runs one borough-wide until 31 May 2028, covering the Plaistow wards, so a plain rented house or flat here needs a licence, unlike in most boroughs.
- Additional licensing
- A council scheme that extends HMO licensing to smaller shared houses below the national five-or-more rule. Newham’s runs until 31 December 2027 over the same wards, and most by-the-room shares in Plaistow’s terraces fall into it.
- HMO
- A house in multiple occupation, where three or more tenants from different households share a kitchen or bathroom. A lot of Plaistow’s terraces are let this way, and under Newham’s scheme they need a licence.
Sharers, HMOs and handing a shared house back
A big share of Plaistow’s terraces are let by the room. The rents are lower than most of the Tube map this close to the City, so the houses fill with sharers, and people come and go on different dates. That makes the end of a tenancy messier than a single family moving out in one go.
The hard part of a shared house is consistency. One housemate keeps their room spotless, the next leaves it rough, and the kitchen all of them cooked in carries the load for everyone. We clean the whole house to one standard so the report cannot single out the worst room. If your house is handed back in stages as people leave on different dates, tell us, because a room cleaned three weeks before the check-out will need looking at again.
Shared kitchens and bathrooms are where the deductions actually live. The grease behind a hob four people used, the scale in a shower run twice as often as one tenant would run it, the inside of a fridge nobody quite owned, the bins nobody emptied the last week. We strip all of that back to the check-in standard, because that is the only standard a clerk will sign off.
There is also the question of who pays. In a shared house the deposit is usually split between the tenants, so a cleaning deduction comes out of everyone’s money, including the people who kept their rooms immaculate. Splitting the cost of one professional clean across the house is almost always cheaper than the deduction the landlord would take from the lot of you, and we can quote the whole house as a single job when housemates scatter on different days.
What the clean covers and booking it round the move
An end of tenancy clean with us is a full top-to-bottom job on an empty house. Every room gets done: surfaces, the deep skirting and picture rails, doors and handles, switches, cobwebs out of the high corners, mirrors and glass, the insides of cupboards and wardrobes, the bannister and stairs, and the floors hoovered and washed throughout. Kitchens and bathrooms get the heavy work.
We price by the size of the house, never by the hour. A studio runs £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425, with the oven and the carpets priced on top if you want them. Plaistow terraces tend to run to three and four bedrooms once a house is shared, so most jobs here sit at the larger end. An hourly clean rewards rushing, and a check-out is the one job you do not want rushed. The crew stays until the house is done to the checklist, even when a four-bed terrace over three floors takes most of the day. No clock-watching. If you would rather have cleaners by the hour for a part-job, that is £30 per cleaner, but for a check-out the fixed price is almost always the better deal.
A few conditions make the clean possible at all. The house needs to be empty of your belongings, the electricity and hot water on, and the fridge and freezer defrosted before we arrive. Defrosting catches people out every time, because a freezer wants most of a day to clear, so pull the plug the night before rather than on the morning we arrive, or the crew meets a block of ice and the appliance cannot be signed off. The power and water are the other trap, because in the rush of a move the accounts sometimes get closed a day early, and there is nothing anyone can do in a house with no hot water but rebook.
The most reliable thing you can do is book the clean for the day of the check-out, so the house is fresh when the clerk walks in rather than sitting a week collecting dust. We fit the job to the day the keys are due back, and we do not charge extra for a Saturday or Sunday. Parking is usually straightforward on the terraced streets, though the ones inside the controlled zone near the station want a visitor permit, so if your road is permit-only say so when you book and we will sort the van out.
Some jobs need more than the standard clean, and these can be booked alongside it:
- Oven cleaning with the removable parts taken out and degreased separately, from £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range. It is the first thing a clerk checks, so on most handovers it pays for itself.
- Carpet cleaning by hot-water extraction, at £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Worth it where the stairs and bedrooms have had a hard year of shared living.
- Sofas, mattresses and curtains left in a furnished let, cleaned by upholstery cleaning with the same hot-water method.
- The bay and the windows the indoor clean cannot reach from outside, done by exterior window cleaning with water-fed poles.
Booking is meant to be quick, because a move rarely leaves you spare time. Call 0333 555 2076, email [email protected], or send the details through our contact page, tell us the size of the house and the date the keys are due back, and we give you a fixed price rather than an hourly guess. We work seven days a week with no weekend surcharge. If you want the same crew for the move itself, our removals team can clear the house first; we also handle one-off resets through our deep cleaning service, ongoing regular domestic cleaning and floor care if you are staying local.
We cover this corner of Newham from here, so if your move stays local we clean the streets around Plaistow too. That includes West Ham one stop down the line, Upton Park the other way, and Canning Town by the river, all to the same checklist and the same guarantee. The full picture is on our end of tenancy cleaning hub, and the borough page is end of tenancy cleaning in Newham.
Questions Plaistow tenants ask
How much does end of tenancy cleaning in Plaistow cost?
The size of the house sets the price, not the clock: a studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Most Plaistow jobs are three and four-bed terraces, often shared, so they sit at the larger end. Give us the bedroom and bathroom count, say whether you want the oven or carpets adding, and the quote is fixed from there, weekends included.
Will the clean get my deposit back?
A cleaning charge is the easiest deduction a landlord can write, so taking the house up to inventory standard removes it from the table. We work to a 57-point checklist the agents recognise, and 97% of our cleans pass the check-out first time. Our cleans have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits over the years, though the last word is always the landlord’s and the report’s.
What happens if the inventory clerk is not satisfied?
Should the clerk or the agent take issue with anything, we return and put right the items in question with a free 48-hour re-clean. There is no second charge. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across Newham, so most of the time we are already cleaning to the standard the local clerks want.
Do you clean old Victorian terraces as well as new flats?
Terraces are most of our work in Plaistow. An old house has deep skirting, picture rails, sash and bay windows and a narrow back kitchen where grease climbs the wall, so there is more surface to clean than a new flat and more places a clerk looks. We clean the runs people forget, the tops of doors, behind the cooker, the sill under the bay.
The bathroom has black mould in the grout. Can you sort it?
Yes, and it is better left to us than tackled with bleach the week you leave. Smearing mould about can make a patch look worse, and a clerk can tell cleaned grout from smeared grout. We treat the grout and sealant properly so it comes back to the check-in standard rather than just going lighter for a day.
Do I need a licence for my rented home in Plaistow?
Almost certainly, and so does your landlord. Newham licenses nearly every privately rented home in the borough, shared houses and single-household lets together, under a borough-wide scheme now in its third term. Selective licensing for single-household lets runs until 31 May 2028 and covers the Plaistow wards, and additional HMO licensing for shared houses runs until 31 December 2027, as the council’s licensing pages set out.
Can you clean a shared house when everyone leaves on different days?
Yes, and it is common in Plaistow. Tell us the house is coming back in stages, because a room cleaned three weeks before the check-out usually wants a second pass. We clean the whole house to one standard so the report cannot single out the worst room, and we can quote it as a single job split across the housemates.
What do you need from me before the clean?
An empty house, your things out, the power and hot water still on, and the fridge and freezer switched off in time to defrost. If a shared house is coming back one room at a time, flag it, because a bedroom cleaned a fortnight before the inspection nearly always wants a second look.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
Not at all, as long as the crew can get in and the power and water are on. Most people drop a key with us or the agent and carry on with the move, and we let you know the moment the job is finished so you can slot the check-out in behind us.
Can you clean the bay windows and the glass?
Yes. The insides of the windows and the glass are part of the standard clean, the runners and glazing bars on the older sliding frames included, and the bay takes longer than people expect because of all the frame. For the outside of the glass we use exterior window cleaning with water-fed poles.
Is parking a problem for the van on Plaistow’s streets?
Usually it is fine on the terraced roads. The streets inside the controlled zone near the station want a visitor permit, so if your road is permit-only let us know when you book and we will plan the van around it.
Can you clean at the weekend or at short notice?
We do, seven days a week, with no extra charge for a Saturday or Sunday. Last-minute jobs are routine, but slots tighten toward the end of the month when half the borough seems to move at once, so an early call gets you more choice.
Can you add carpet and oven cleaning to the end of tenancy clean?
Yes, and most check-outs here take at least the oven. A single oven is £77, a double £110 and a range £114, all stripped down rather than wiped. Carpets by hot-water extraction run £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room or £115 for a whole two-bed, all in one visit.
Do you clean other areas near Plaistow?
We cover this corner of Newham. As well as Plaistow we clean West Ham down the line, Upton Park the other way, and Canning Town by the river, all to the same 57-point checklist and the same 48-hour guarantee.