Local end of tenancy cleaning in Plumstead Common

On a Plumstead Common check-out the clerk reaches for the shower screen first, tilts it against the window light, and runs a thumbnail down the chrome. SE18 water is hard enough that a chalky scale film sets on every tap and screen within a year, and a cloth does nothing to it. So end-of-tenancy cleaning here has to be built for the report, not for show: checklist-driven, deposit-focused, billed at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SE18 streets around the Common, the Old Mill Road conservation block, Genesta Road and Plum Lane, the Lakedale Road end, and the slopes running up toward Shooters Hill. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Greenwich.

The report you are actually being marked against

Begin with the mechanism, because almost nobody does. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote an inventory describing every surface, usually with photos, usually with the kitchen and bathroom logged as clean or as new. That was true on the day, because the place had just had a professional clean. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares the two reports line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, can be charged against your deposit. You are being held to a professional standard set on day one, which is exactly why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely clears it.

The money is not abstract. On the SE18 rescue jobs we get called into, the deductions land in a familiar shape: £85 to £120 on the oven, £70 to £150 on bathroom scale and grout, £60 to £100 for the gaps behind appliances, £120 to £300 on tired carpets. Plumstead deposits are smaller than the Greenwich riverside ones, often a one-bed sitting around £1,400 to £1,800, but the deductions are the same size, so they bite a bigger hole in a smaller pot. Most tenants only run that sum after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round.

Two laws sit behind all of this and they pull opposite ways. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means your landlord cannot write professional cleaning into the contract as a condition, so nobody can force you to book us. Damp and black mould, on the other hand, are a landlord repair duty under the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, not a tenant cleaning failure. Where we find structural damp behind a wardrobe or in a cold bathroom corner, we photograph it and note it, so the charge sits where it belongs rather than on you.

Why SE18 water loses more deposits than anything else

Plumstead sits in Thames Water’s hard-water zone, and that one fact costs more deposits here than the oven does. London’s supply runs around 290 to 300 mg/l of calcium carbonate, which is very hard by any reading, because the water draws its minerals passing through the chalk and limestone under the South East. Scale builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect. A wipe with a cloth leaves it sitting there. The clerk knows this, which is why the bathroom is checked early and hard.

We descale properly rather than smear vinegar at it, because the deposits round here shrug vinegar off. Taps, shower head, screen, the tile run behind the basin, the kettle if it is staying with the flat: all soaked and worked back to clean. Grout is the other quiet deduction. Kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a charge in this borough more often than carpets are. We scrub it, and where it is genuinely past saving, which happens in the longer terrace lets, we photograph the state before we start.

A dated photo of grey grout has settled more disputes here than any argument has.

That photo is dated and timestamped, and an adjudicator cannot let a landlord bill you for grout that was already grey in the check-in pictures. The clerks understand this too, which is why a well-documented job rarely gets a quarrel in the first place.

What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it left alone

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 rolled over to a periodic tenancy, so a tenant can now 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 at all. The Tenant Fees Act still applies, the check-in benchmark still applies, and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing. Plumstead already runs on a lot of agent-managed lets with high turnover, and once those tenants leave on a rolling two months rather than a fixed date, the month-end pile-up gets less predictable. The dull but paying takeaway: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want will be gone if you leave it to the 29th.

The 57 things, and the dozen your clerk checks first

Every booking here runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of SE18 check-outs and tuned to what this side of the borough’s clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job. The dozen below is where the deposit is usually won or lost, in rough order of how often it gets photographed.

1. Oven interior, including the film between the door-glass panels and the slide-out tray.
2. Extractor hood and the filter behind the metal grille.
3. Behind and under the fridge-freezer, the floor included.
4. Bath and shower silicone, the screen, and the shower head itself.
5. Toilet base, hinges, under the rim, and inside the cistern lid.
6. Splashback grease above the hob and the strip of ceiling directly over it.
7. Window tracks, internal glass, and the inside of the frames.
8. Skirting and picture rails, which the older terraces are full of.
9. Inside wardrobes, cupboards and drawers, tops included.
10. Carpet wear strips down the hallway and around chair legs.
11. Door tops, light switches, sockets, intercom handsets.
12. Smoke alarm, extractor grilles, ceiling roses, hall lights.

That is twelve. The other forty-five are mostly belt-and-braces, but they are the reason we hold a 97% first-time pass rate across the routine inventory work we do for the 300+ letting agents who book us.

The kitchen, where most of it goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak in a tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. After that, the rest of the room: hob trim and burners off and washed, the extractor degreased with the filter soaked or swapped, every cupboard inside and out, the fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind them are done, then put back. The washing machine drum, the detergent drawer out, and the rubber door seal, which is the first thing a clerk opens. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled, because the hard water never gives those a miss.

Bathrooms, bedrooms and the rest

Scale comes off the taps, screen and tiles first, then the toilet done properly, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges and behind the pedestal. Shower screen both sides, tracks and the sealant bead. Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they lift off the wall. In the bedrooms and living rooms: inside every wardrobe and built-in cupboard, skirting, door frames, handles, switches, and the ceiling roses, which in an Edwardian Plumstead flat hold years of dust. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped, with an honest line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill, not yours to scrub away. Two jobs often need their own pass: hot-water extraction on the carpets, which the carpet cleaning add-on covers on the same visit, and a hard-used sofa in a shared let that wants full upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover.

Plumstead Common stock: older than the blocks let on

People clock the bigger post-war blocks at the eastern edge and assume the whole area is modern. It is not. The streets ringing the Common, and the slope down toward Plum Lane and Genesta Road, are mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces, a lot of them bay-fronted and built between the 1880s and the early 1900s for the Royal Arsenal workforce when Woolwich was booming. Many are now split into flats. Mixed through it you get 1930s ribbon, pockets of ex-local-authority stock, and the odd modern infill block. The clean has to suit whatever the property actually is, not what a template assumes, so we work the area in three loose bands.

Around the Common itself

The Common is 103 acres of preserved common land, saved from enclosure under the Plumstead Commons Act 1878, with the Slade dell and its pond on the east side and Winns Common running off it. The streets here are the period heart of the area: Old Mill Road, with its conservation block behind the Old Mill pub, the surviving 18th-century windmill that still towers over the building. Genesta Road carries something genuinely rare, the Lubetkin terrace at numbers 85 to 91, four reinforced-concrete houses of 1933 to 1934 that are Grade II* listed and the only modernist terrace England built in the 1930s. The flats in these roads have original detail the inventory names one by one: cornices, ceiling roses, picture rails, sometimes a tiled hall, often a bay window with the sashes still in. The clean has to match that, and nothing aggressive goes near original paint or plaster.

The slopes and the family terraces

Keep going and the ground rises toward Shooters Hill, and the longer family tenancies sit on the steeper streets: Plum Lane, Eglinton Road, the roads climbing off Plumstead Common Road. Three-bed terraces, a fair few with a cramped rear extension and a kitchen that is either six months old or last touched decades ago. Long lets mean build-up in the places nobody cleaned between tenants, behind the cooker and under the fridge especially. We win these on the dull, slow work, not on anything clever.

The Lakedale end and the newer stock

Down toward Lakedale Road, Conway Road and the streets feeding Plumstead High Street, the mix turns to smaller flats, conversions and some newer build, with Woolwich and its Elizabeth line station a short way west pulling renters through on shorter tenancies. The newer flats come with integrated appliances and engineered floors that each want the right product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for. Not sure which band your street falls in, or whether your address is even SE18? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds.

What it costs, against what is at stake

Plumstead Common runs on our standard SE18 rate, with no Greenwich postcode premium tacked on. A studio is £156 and a one-bed flat or maisonette is £207. A two-bed flat or terrace is £243, a three-bed is £339, and a four-bed is £425. Small or partial jobs, a top-up clean or an odd-shaped property, run at £30 per hour per cleaner. The common add-ons are priced plainly too: carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom or £43 a living room, with a whole two-bed’s carpeted area at £115; an oven on its own is £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 a smoker’s flat costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after.

Run the maths the way the deposit forces you to. A one-bed at £207 to protect a deposit of £1,600 or so is barely a decision. Every 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, as long as you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Our pass rate across SE18 jobs sits near 97%, but the guarantee is the real point, because a failed check-out is the expensive way to find out you cut a corner. There is a reason agents on this side of the borough know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

A Plum Lane flat from March

“Handed back a one-bed off Plum Lane after eighteen months, just me living there. The worry was the kitchen extractor and a mould patch behind the bathroom basin. Two cleaners came on a Tuesday morning, pulled the extractor housing right off the wall, degreased the back of it and refitted it, and treated the mould. Acorn signed the inventory off the next afternoon and the £1,650 deposit was in my account by the Friday. £165, paid after the check-out went through. Cheapest stress I have ever bought.”
Hannah, Plum Lane SE18, March 2026

That is a fair example of the SE18 pattern: a single tenant, a tired extractor, a damp corner, and an agent who actually checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was on the table. What turned it was the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, as much as the scrubbing, and that is the part most do-it-yourself check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it, and the parking up the hill

Booking is four steps. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the bedroom count, the agent name and the check-out date, and we price it on the call, no site visit needed for standard SE18 stock. We book you in, ideally the day before check-out so the flat is fresh on the day. The flat needs to be empty when we arrive, and we also do removals if you want the move and the clean on one booking. At the end you get a photo set, every room before and after, with an itemised invoice on company-headed paper, which is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.

One honest note on parking. The roads right on the Common are largely uncontrolled or pay-and-display, but the streets behind, around Old Mill Road and Lakedale Road especially, sit in controlled-parking zones, and several of the streets climbing toward Shooters Hill are steep and tight. Tell us the arrangement when you book, a visitor permit, a meter or a CPZ bay, and how we get in. Sorting that in advance takes the sting out of the day.

Three jobs people book the wrong one of

These get muddled, and on a hand-back it is worth booking the right one. A deep clean is not an end-of-tenancy clean, and an adjudicator expects the inventory comparison.

Check-in inventory report

The document the 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 rather than to a vague idea of clean.

End-of-tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, against the letting-agent standard, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £22 an hour on a weekly visit.

We also work the areas around Plumstead Common when a tenancy straddles a boundary or your next place is one over: End of Tenancy Cleaning Woolwich, End of Tenancy Cleaning Shooters Hill, End of Tenancy Cleaning Charlton and End of Tenancy Cleaning Greenwich Town.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning on Plumstead Common?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Small or partial jobs are £30 per hour per cleaner. SE18 sits on our standard rate, so there is no Greenwich postcode surcharge and the price you are quoted is the price you pay.

Do I really need professional end-of-tenancy cleaning here?

You are allowed to do it yourself; the Tenant Fees Act 2019 stops a landlord making it a contractual condition. The catch is the benchmark. The check-in standard was set by a professional clean, and matching that without professional kit is genuinely hard, particularly on the SE18 scale. With a typical Plumstead deposit of £1,400 to £1,800, the maths usually points one way.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change anything for tenants here?

From 1 May 2026, Section 21 evictions are abolished and every existing assured shorthold tenancy converts to a periodic one, so tenants can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning obligations at end of tenancy do not change. The real effect in Plumstead is more frequent and less predictable move-outs, so book as early as you can.

How does Royal Greenwich selective licensing affect my move-out?

It does not change what you must do as a tenant, but it tightens what landlords need to evidence at hand-back, which has firmed up the standard agents apply on check-out. The borough’s selective licensing scheme runs from 1 October 2022 to 30 September 2027 across parts of Plumstead, Glyndon, Shooters Hill, Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside, and the council’s address lookup tells you whether your property is in it.

Why is hard water a bigger deal in SE18 than elsewhere?

Thames Water’s supply across London runs around 290 to 300 mg/l of calcium carbonate, very hard, because the water passes through chalk and limestone under the South East. Shower screens, taps and kettles scale fast, and inventory clerks photograph all three. We descale with a proper scale remover, not white vinegar, which the deposits round here ignore.

What about the bath sealant and silicone?

Black mould set into old silicone is the second-biggest deposit-grabber in SE18 after scale. We treat surface mould; where the silicone is past treatment we note it in writing as a fair-wear-and-tear item rather than a cleaning matter, which is the correct framing under deposit-scheme rules.

Do you handle the period terraces around the Common?

Yes. The streets around Plumstead Common and down toward Genesta Road and Plum Lane are mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces, often split into flats, with original cornices, ceiling roses, picture rails and bay sashes. We use appropriate products on those features and put nothing aggressive where the inventory lists original detail.

Do you clean the carpets too?

Yes, as an add-on on the same visit. It is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, and £115 for a whole two-bed’s carpeted area. We use hot-water extraction rather than a dry powder, because the older terrace carpets round here hold foot-traffic strips a surface treatment leaves behind.

Do you clean ovens on their own?

Yes. A single oven is £77, a double is £110, and a 90cm range cooker is £114. We take the door off where the hinges allow and split the inner glass so the film between the panels comes out. If the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it.

Can I book the clean for the night before the check-out?

That is when most of our SE18 clients book us. The flat stays fresh between the clean and the inspection, with no overnight occupancy in between, so nothing gets undone before the clerk arrives. We would rather work it that way too.

What if my agent rejects the clean?

You ring us inside 48 hours and we come back and fix the listed items, free. Our 97% first-time pass rate means rejects are rare. If it does go further, our invoice, dated photo report and re-clean record are admissible at deposit-scheme adjudication, and a tenant with a complete paper trail very rarely loses.

Does the flat need to be empty?

Fully empty is strongly preferred. Furniture left behind blocks access and creates uncertainty at the check-out. A single item left for the next tenant can be worked around, but the more that stays, the less complete the clean can be.

Which agents do you work with around Plumstead High Street?

The Acorn office, which incorporates John Payne, plus the smaller independents on Plumstead High Street and Plumstead Common Road, and the borough branches that cover the SE18 side. We are booked by 300+ letting agents overall, and agent-specific inventory requirements are passed to the cleaners where they apply.

Where can I read up on my deposit rights?

Your deposit sits with one of the three schemes, the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits or the DPS, and each runs free adjudication. Shelter’s guidance walks through the steps. Adjudicator decisions are final, so the more evidence you have at the start, the less likely you are to need it.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Plumstead Common

Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Plumstead Common, oven cleaning in Plumstead Common and domestic cleaning in Plumstead Common.