Roman Road end of tenancy cleaning

On a flat above the shops on Roman Road, the inventory clerk opens the oven door before they take their coat off. Two years of Sunday roasts bakes a brown film onto the door glass and the racks, and it sits in the exact spot the check-in photo shows looking new, so it is the first thing that costs a tenant money on this street. That is what an end of tenancy clean in Bow has to answer to: the clerk’s report, room by room, to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, at £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee tied to the checkout. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a fixed price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover Roman Road and the E3 streets around it, from the market end near Bow Road and Mile End up toward Old Ford, the Regent’s Canal and the Victoria Park fringe. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Tower Hamlets.

How the check-in report quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does, and it is the whole game on Roman Road. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photographs, usually with the word “clean” or “as new” against the kitchen and bathroom. Those words were true that day, because the flat had just had a professional turnaround. At checkout a clerk walks it again and compares line by line, and anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely gets a tenant over the line.

The money is predictable, and it is not where tenants brace for it. It comes off the oven, the scale, the bathroom sealant and the parts nobody looks behind, not the rooms scrubbed hardest. On a flat let furnished off the market the check-in detail is usually thorough, because the agents working this road have filled these places for years and know what a two-year tenancy does to them. The clerk turns up with that document and a torch and goes looking for the gap between it and the flat in front of them.

What lands on the deduction list here barely varies. Carbon on the oven glass and racks. A crust of scale on the taps, shower head and inside the kettle. A bloom of mould along the silicone in a bathroom with a tiny window and no fan. Scuffed paint on a communal stair in one of the estate blocks. Window runners furred with grime. And the darker, flattened band of carpet where a sofa or wardrobe stood the whole tenancy. The flat this page keeps returning to was the oven, almost entirely. The bedrooms were spotless. The cooker was the argument.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a Bow move-out

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone. Every assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point 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. The benchmark is still the check-in report and the checkout clean has to hit the same bar it did the week before. What changed is timing. Roman Road was already a high-churn street, full of one-year and two-year lets across a mix of students, young professionals, families and long-settled East End households. Let those tenancies end on a rolling two months instead of a fixed date and the move-outs get more frequent and less predictable. The takeaway is dull and it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want at month-end will already be gone if you wait.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change. What changed is timing.

The law, the schemes, and the four cleans people mix up

Cleaning is one of the few deductions a landlord can still make cleanly, so it pays to know the rules before the keys go back. Your deposit sits in a government-backed scheme. A landlord cannot bill you for fair wear and tear, and cannot demand the flat back cleaner than the inventory recorded it, but they can charge to bring it back to the documented standard, and on a two-year let that gap can be wide. If it comes to a dispute, it is raised through whichever scheme holds the money, the Tenancy Deposit Scheme or mydeposits, with the clerk’s photographs and report as the evidence on both sides. Shelter has plain guidance on what counts as a fair deduction if you want to read it before you challenge anything.

People also book the wrong job, so here is the difference in one place.

Check-in inventory report

The document a clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos. It is the benchmark your checkout is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a vague idea of “clean”.

End of tenancy clean

The hand-back clean, built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, done to the agent’s checklist with the flat empty and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean is the same intensity of work for a flat you are staying in, with no clerk and no guarantee tied to a report, from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A domestic clean is week-to-week upkeep, from £22 an hour on a weekly booking.

What the hard supply does to Bow taps and kettles

The water in Bow is hard, and it loses more deposits here than anything except the oven. It comes from Thames Water, drawn off the chalk and the Lee Valley reservoirs, and across this part of east London it runs well over 250 parts per million of calcium, firmly in the very hard band. That scale sets on anything that meets hot water. In a terrace flat at the market end the taps, shower head and kettle fur up over a tenancy, and the clerk does check them; on a Cranbrook kitchen the same scale dulls the mixer tap within months.

We take the taps, shower head and kettle back with a proper descaler, not a cloth, because a wipe only moves the cloudy bloom around and it returns within days. Where scale has built on a shower screen or a glazed tile near a tap it gets the same treatment. A clerk holds the screen up to the light, and a film shows the moment they do.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

Every Roman Road booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local checkouts and tuned to what this borough’s clerks actually flag. It is effectively the same list the clerk is working from. The full thing comes with the job; here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of the money goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped. The door is taken apart and the glass cleaned between the two panes, the racks and grill tray go in to soak, and the carbon comes off the floor and roof of the cavity with a scraper rather than a cloth over the top. This was the whole of the job on the flat above. After the oven, the rest of the room: the hob and surround degreased and the burners lifted, the extractor cover and its metal filter taken out and degreased rather than wiped through, the tiles and grout behind the hob done because two years of frying ends up there. The fridge and freezer are cleaned inside and out with the seals, defrosted if the flat is left empty. Cupboard fronts and interiors, handles, the crumbs out of the drawers. The sink scrubbed and the scale-furred mixer tap descaled back to bright metal.

The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower arm and head, the valve and the waste with a proper descaler. Tiles and grout are washed and brushed, and any mould spotting in the corners or along the sealant line is treated, which is the one most tenants leave in a flat with no extractor. The shower screen or curtain rail is left clear, because a film shows under a bathroom light. Mirror and glass shelves left smear-free, since a smear is the first thing a clerk notices. The toilet done inside, behind and at the scale line under the waterline.

Everywhere else

• Windows cleaned inside, frames and runners wiped, two years of grime out of the channels.
• Wardrobes and storage wiped inside, outside and on top, where dust sits unseen for a whole tenancy.
• Skirting, doors and frames wiped down, scuffs lifted where they come away without taking the finish with them.
• Carpets vacuumed including the flattened band where a bed or sofa stood; a shampoo is an add-on if the inventory asks for it.
• Communal stair and hallway on the estate blocks: the paint, skirting and door frames that scuff so easily, plus switches and sockets.
• Hard floors washed last so a film does not dry, and the strip where the furniture stood done properly.

One thing we will not do is promise to scrub a scuff out of soft paint when the only honest result is a shiny patch that reads worse than the mark. We say straight when something is a landlord’s paint job rather than a clean. The flat should match the check-in report, and on a Roman Road let that usually means the oven has to come back as if nobody had ever roasted in it.

Roman Road street by street, market end to Old Ford

Roman Road is the historic market street of Bow. It runs about a quarter of a mile of stalls through the middle of it, the market everyone round here just calls “the Roman”, trading Tuesdays, Thursdays and all day Saturday, and the housing either side is not one thing. Walk it and the clerk’s report changes every few hundred yards, which is why one cleaning method does not pass all of it. We work it in bands.

The market end: terraces, conversions and the independent shops

The stretch by the stalls is Victorian and Edwardian terraces of every size and condition, a lot of them long ago split into flats and let by the room, above and behind the independent shops the street is known for. These are the furnished couple-lets where the check-in detail is heaviest and the oven and the scale carry the whole checkout.

The estates: Cranbrook, Lakeview and the blocks off Old Ford Road

North of the market, toward Old Ford Road and the Hertford Union Canal, are the estates the council and the old London County Council put up after the war. The Cranbrook Estate is the landmark, designed by Skinner, Bailey and the Soviet emigre Berthold Lubetkin and opened in 1964, laid out around a figure-of-eight street called Mace Street, its six towers set in pairs and named after Bethnal Green’s twin towns, Alzette, Modling, Offenbach, Puteaux, St Gilles and Velletri. The Lakeview Estate sits behind it. A lot of these homes are maisonettes over two floors on a single stair with no lift, and it is the communal paint that gets scuffed on move-out day and written up if nobody touches it.

Tredegar Square, the conservation streets and the new-build

Around Tredegar Square, the grandest Georgian set-piece in the East End, and the Driffield Road conservation area, there are restored period houses with the original detail still in the rooms, where the checkout matches cornice and rails by hand and nothing aggressive goes near old plaster. Then, running up toward Fish Island and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park fringe, the new-build infill blocks handed over with corporate inventory sheets that are stricter than most private landlords bother with. There is no single Bow property type. The area next door, end of tenancy cleaning in Old Ford, sits on the far side of the same estates, so we run the same checklist across both.

Tower Hamlets licensing and who lets around the market

Roman Road sits in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and the licensing here catches more flats than people on this road expect. Mandatory HMO licensing applies to the larger shared houses, and on top of it the whole borough has run an additional HMO licensing scheme since April 2024, so a privately let flat shared by three or more people from two or more households needs a licence whatever floor it is on. That sweeps in a lot of the split terraces off the market that would not be licensable in many boroughs. The borough’s selective licensing is separate and only covers Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown, not Bow, so a Roman Road landlord is usually thinking about the additional HMO regime. A licensed HMO is inspected against management standards, so a landlord re-letting wants the flat back clean enough to turn around fast, and that pushes the checkout bar up.

Lettings around here run largely through the branches on and near the market and the agents handling the Bow Quarter and the newer blocks on Fairfield Road. The report format barely changes from one E3 agent to the next, and we are trusted by 300+ letting agents across London, so we clean to the checkout standard their clerks inspect against.

What it costs, and the maths nobody runs in time

Prices are fixed by the size of the flat, not invented per job, matching the schema on this page. No survey, no call-out fee.

A carpet shampoo is an add-on where the inventory wants it: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. A single oven is built into the price already; a double is £110 and a 90cm range is £114. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household or a flat that has not had a proper clean in years costs more, and we say so on the phone, not after.

Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. Set a £207 clean against a deposit well over a thousand pounds on most Bow flats and it is not really a decision. Across the work we have done we have put more than £1.2m of deposits back in tenants’ hands, at a 97% first-time pass rate against checkout reports. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags anything that was on our list, we come back within three days and put it right at no charge.

Where the clerk goes first, and why we build backwards from it

If you want to know where the money is, watch where the clerk goes first. In a Roman Road flat the order barely changes: the oven and the glass between the panes against the check-in photo, then the hob and extractor for grease, the taps and kettle for scale, the bathroom sealant for mould, the fridge and cupboard interiors, the window runners for grime, the communal-stair paint on an estate block, and last the strip of carpet where a bed or sofa sat the whole tenancy.

Our checklist is built backwards from exactly that walk, which is why the first-time pass rate sits where it does. The reason renters lose money is simply not knowing that the oven, the scale and the bathroom sealant are the whole game in a flat like this. A re-clean callout, when it happens, comes off the same short list.

The five things that get us re-called

• The oven glass between the panes. Someone does the inside and the front but not the gap between the two sheets, and the clerk holds it to the light and sees the brown film. The single most common re-call here.
• Scale that grew back on a wiped tap, because someone wiped it instead of descaling it and the cloudy bloom returned within days on the hard supply.
• Mould along the bathroom sealant, where the visible tiles get cleaned but the black spotting in the silicone line gets left.
• The flattened carpet band, not the dirt: the carpet looks hoovered, but the compressed strip where a wardrobe sat for two years was never lifted, and a furnished-let inventory flags it.
• Estate-stair scuffs counted as the flat, on a Cranbrook or Lakeview block where the communal paint gets marked on move-out day and written up if nobody has touched it.

A market-side job from this spring

“We rented a one-bed above one of the shops on the market side for just over two years, the two of us, no kids, and we kept it clean. We’d done the bedroom, the bathroom, hoovered everywhere twice. The one thing we let go the whole time was the oven. Roast most Sundays, and the door glass had gone black on the inside, you couldn’t see through it, and the racks were carbon. Oven spray from the corner shop just streaked. The inventory had a clear photo of that oven looking new at check-in, so it was always going to be the thing he checked. Two cleaners took the oven door apart, split the panes and did the glass between them, soaked the racks and scraped the cavity floor, and descaled the kitchen taps and kettle while they were at it. The clerk opened the oven the next morning, looked, and took the kitchen straight off the list. We had a £1,400 deposit and got the whole lot back inside a fortnight.”
Priya, ex-tenant, Roman Road E3, April 2026

That is the pattern on the market side: a long tenancy, an oven nobody had dealt with in years, and a clerk who checks against a photo. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake, and what turned it was booking the day before the checkout, so anything flagged still had time to be put right under the guarantee.

Booking it, and the market-day problem

Booking is a phone call. Here is how it runs.

1. Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the Roman Road postcode, the number of bedrooms and your checkout date.
2. We give you a fixed price on that call from the list above. No survey for a standard flat or maisonette.
3. We book the team for a slot before your checkout, ideally the day before, so anything the clerk flags can still be sorted.
4. Two cleaners turn up with everything, the oven kit and the descaler included. You supply nothing, which matters when the flat is already empty.
5. If the clerk pulls up something on our list, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we return within three days and fix it at no cost.

One honest word about the access. The terraces by the market are tight for a van, and the market runs Tuesday, Thursday and all day Saturday from mid-morning, so a Saturday move at the market end with the stalls up is a genuine headache, worth avoiding if you can pick the day. Controlled parking runs across most of the surrounding streets on weekdays, and on the Cranbrook and Lakeview blocks you are often looking at a flat over two floors, one stair, no lift, and a long carry. We would rather come once the furniture is out and the flat is empty, which is also when the oven and the floors come up properly. If the oven or the carpet is the only thing the agent has flagged, a standalone oven clean or carpet clean covers it on its own, and an after builders clean is there for the new-build infill flats handed straight over from a fit-out.

Questions we get asked

How much is an end of tenancy clean for a Roman Road flat?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. A two-bed maisonette on the Cranbrook Estate is the £243 line. Part jobs are £30 per hour per cleaner if you only need certain rooms.

Why does the oven matter so much on a Bow let?

Two years of roasting bakes carbon onto the door glass, racks and grill tray, usually the exact spot the clerk photographed looking new at check-in. It is the most common reason a hand-back on this street stalls, far more than the bedrooms tenants worry about.

Do you guarantee the clean against the inventory checkout?

Yes. We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist and back it with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the clerk flags something that was on our list, we return within three days and fix it at no charge.

What is your first-time pass rate?

97%. Across the end of tenancy work we have done since 2014 we have recovered more than £1.2m in deposits for tenants, working with 300+ letting agents.

Can you clean the oven glass between the two panes?

Yes. We take the oven door apart, split the panes and clean the glass between them, then soak the racks and grill tray and scrape the carbon off the cavity floor. Doing only the front and the inside is the single most common re-clean callout here.

Is the hard water a real problem on the fittings here?

It is. Bow is on hard Thames Water, well over 250 parts per million of calcium, so scale builds on taps, shower heads and inside the kettle over a tenancy. We descale with a proper descaler rather than wipe, because a wipe only moves the cloudy bloom around and it comes straight back within days.

Which parts of Roman Road and Bow do you cover?

All of it. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces and split flats by the market, the Cranbrook and Lakeview estates off Old Ford Road, the restored houses around Tredegar Square and the Driffield Road conservation area, and the new-build infill up toward Fish Island and the Olympic Park fringe.

Does my Bow flat need an HMO licence?

Possibly. Tower Hamlets has run a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme since April 2024, so a privately let flat shared by three or more people from two or more households needs a licence whatever floor it is on. Selective licensing is separate and covers only Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown, not Bow. Check the current position with Tower Hamlets before you let.

Can you come the day before my checkout?

That is the timing we recommend. Booking the clean the day before the inventory checkout means that if the clerk flags anything, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee still has time to put it right before the deposit decision.

Should I avoid a Saturday clean at the market end?

If you can. Roman Road Market runs Tuesday, Thursday and all day Saturday from mid-morning, so a Saturday move at the market end with the stalls up makes the van and the carry much harder. A quiet weekday is easier for everyone.

Do I have to empty the flat first?

Yes, ideally fully empty. Furniture left behind blocks access and leaves the darker carpet strip and the floor underneath undone, which is exactly what a furnished-let inventory looks for. A single item for the next tenant can be worked around, but the more that stays, the less complete the clean.

How do I actually book it?

Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and your checkout date. We quote off the flat list, book the day, and send two cleaners with all the kit.