Hand back a flat in the old part of Rotherhithe and the inventory clerk does not start in the sitting room. They open the oven, then run a thumbnail round the bath taps for the hard-water film, and in a converted wharf off Rotherhithe Street or a small cottage by St Mary’s church that is exactly where the SE16 deposit goes. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, a UK end of tenancy firm trading since 2014, and we work this village to a 57-point agent-approved checklist at £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee on every job. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover the SE16 4 postcodes of the historic riverside core and the dock edge around it. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Southwark.
How the clean and the agent hand-back actually work
Begin with the mechanism, because the deposit turns on it. On the day you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a check-in inventory: every surface described, almost always photographed, the kitchen and bathroom usually logged as clean or as new because the flat had just been done professionally. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, beyond fair wear and tear, comes off your deposit. You are not being marked against tidy. You are being marked against a professional clean, in photographs, which is why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely clears it.
So an end of tenancy clean here is built backwards from that report. We clean every room top to bottom whether or not it looks like it needs it, because the clerk checks all of it against the pictures, and we hand you a dated before-and-after photo set with the invoice. The clean satisfies the person who writes the report; the photos settle the argument if there ever is one.
The hand-back itself runs in a fixed order. You ring with the postcode, bedrooms and your check-out date; we quote a fixed price on that call, with carpet or oven added if you want them, and tell you the crew size and the hours. We clean the empty flat to the checklist and time it to land before your inventory appointment, not after. If the clerk or the agent flags anything we missed, we are back inside the 48-hour re-clean guarantee to put it right at no charge. The reason that guarantee rarely gets called is dull rather than clever: we treat the building type as the brief and put the hours where this particular kind of Rotherhithe flat tends to fail.
You are not being marked against tidy. You are being marked against a professional clean, in photographs.
The 57 things, and where the hours really go
Every booking runs to the same 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks down here actually flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it first. The list does not change between flats. Where the hours land does, and in this village that is set almost entirely by which kind of building you are handing back.
The kitchen, where the deposit usually goes first
The oven is stripped, not wiped: the door glass split and degreased between the panes, the racks soaked, the back and roof of the cavity, the fan and the seals. The extractor is taken down to the housing where the build-up sits, not dabbed at the grille, because in these riverside flats the housing is where the clerk’s photo bites. Hob, splashback and the tops of the units. Inside, on top of and behind every cupboard. Fridge and freezer cleared and wiped once defrosted, the dishwasher filter and seals, the sink and the mixer descaled hard given the SE16 water. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind the fridge and the washing machine are done, then put back. Skirtings and the floor, into the corners.
Bathrooms, the room the water decides
This is the second front, and it is the one limescale wins if you let it. The shower screen, the tiles, the mixer, the showerhead and the taps all get a proper descale until the glass is clear and the chrome is bright, not a quick wipe that leaves a haze a clerk will lean in and photograph. Toilet cleaned around the base, the hinges and behind the pedestal, not the bowl alone. Extractor vent dusted, mirror and cabinet inside and out, grout scrubbed back, then the floor and skirtings last.
Bedrooms, living areas and the older stock
This is where the village cottages and the wharf conversions take their time. Picture rails, the tops of doors and frames, deep skirtings, and any exposed beams or original timber. Every window cleaned both sides where it opens, glass and frame: on the steel-framed warehouse windows that is slow, and the clerk always checks it. Inside fitted wardrobes and on top of them. Carpets vacuumed to the edges and along the gripper, hard floors cleaned to suit the material. In the older cottages near the church the windows are often the divided, multi-pane sort set in deep reveals, so we do the glazing bars and the putty line as well as the panes, because that is the kind of detail a clerk photographs against a check-in shot that showed it clean.
One thing the period flats need that the new blocks do not is care with the floors. Original boards, parquet and old tile around St Marychurch Street have to be cleaned barely damp and worked along the grain, not flooded or scrubbed across, or you raise the timber and leave marks a clerk reads as damage. We carry the right pads and method for those. In the dock-side blocks it is engineered board and laminate instead, quicker, but the edges and the threshold strips still get done because that is exactly where a vacuum stops and the eye goes.
Throughout the flat
Internal glass and any glazed doors. Skirtings, frames and doors through the whole flat, both sides, with handles and hinges. The front door inside and out, the entry handle and the intercom panel. Cobwebs off the ceiling lines and the corners. The hallway and stair if the flat has one. The flat ends up matching the check-in photographs room by room, which is the only standard the inventory clerk is measuring.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a village move-out
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and existing assured shorthold tenancies have converted to periodic ones, so a tenant can give notice through the year rather than waiting for a fixed end date. Here is the part people get wrong: it did not change the cleaning standard at all. Your deposit is still protected in a government-backed scheme, and an adjudicator still decides a cleaning dispute on one test, the flat at check-out against the inventory and the check-in photos, fair wear and tear aside.
What changed is timing. More Rotherhithe tenancies now end on rolling notice rather than on a tidy date, so the clerk-grade clean is harder to plan around and getting it right the first time matters more than it used to. If a deduction is unfair, the deposit-scheme adjudicator is free, and Shelter sets out a tenant’s footing plainly. Our job is to make sure the clean is never the part you have to argue.
The Southwark licence that holds the bar higher
This one catches village landlords in particular, and it raises the standard your flat is held to. Southwark brought in a second selective licensing designation that started on 1 November 2023 and runs five years to 31 October 2028, and the wards it names include Rotherhithe and Surrey Docks. A great many ordinary let flats in this patch now need a five-year selective licence, on top of the borough-wide additional HMO scheme that runs from 1 March 2022 to 28 February 2027. Southwark’s own licensing pages set out the ward list and the maps, though the council site sometimes blocks automated visitors, so the detail is worth confirming with the council direct.
Why it matters for your deposit is simple. A licensed landlord is being inspected by the council as well as by the agent, so the hand-back standard on a licensed Rotherhithe flat is held tighter than on an unlicensed one elsewhere, and a clerk on a licensed let tends to write a fuller, harder report. We clean to that level as a matter of course, because down here it is more often the standard than the exception.
- 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
- The move-out clean built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 per hour per cleaner.
- Deep clean
- A heavy one-off reset for a home you are staying in, with no inventory to hit. Useful in its place, though a deposit adjudicator never looks at it.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing upkeep for a flat you live in, the lightest of the four, and nothing to do with a hand-back.
If you are leaving a Rotherhithe flat and want the deposit back, it is the end of tenancy clean you book, not a deep clean that misses the inventory standard. People mix the two up constantly, and the wrong booking fails a check-out even when it is done well.
What Thames Water does to a wharf-flat bathroom
Rotherhithe sits in London’s hard-water zone, and that single fact loses more deposits in SE16 than anything except the oven. Thames Water supplies the area at a minimum of around 253 mg/l of calcium carbonate, which is hard by any measure, and you can read the figures on the Thames Water hard-water page. On a glass shower screen and a chrome mixer in a riverside flat that scale sets into a cloudy film inside one tenancy.
The clerk checks for it deliberately. They run a thumbnail down the tap, look at the screen edge-on against the light, and pull the showerhead in close. Limescale that has set into the chrome is not a wipe-off job, and a bathroom left scaled gets marked as not cleaned to the check-in standard even when the rest of the flat is spotless. So we descale the screen, the taps, the head and the tile joints properly, until a clerk cannot photograph a haze. In the older converted wharves the trouble pairs up, because the same flats that scale badly also have the heavy cooking wall and the steel windows, so the bathroom and the kitchen both eat hours. We plan for that rather than discover it on the day.
A bathroom left scaled gets marked as not cleaned to the check-in standard even when the rest of the flat is spotless.
The village street by street, building by building
Rotherhithe Village is the historic conservation core on the river, and it is a strange, good little patch of London: the cobbles around St Marychurch Street, St Mary’s church where the Mayflower’s captain Christopher Jones is buried, the Brunel Museum sitting on the shaft of Marc and Isambard Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, and The Mayflower pub on the water where the Pilgrim ship took on its Rotherhithe passengers in 1620. The flats behind all of that are not one thing, and the deductions follow the building. We are in these streets and pockets most often.
- St Marychurch Street and the lanes around St Mary’s Rotherhithe church
- Rotherhithe Street, the long riverside stretch past The Mayflower
- Elephant Lane and Cathay Street
- Mayflower Street and Swan Road
- Tunnel Road and the streets by the Brunel Museum and Rotherhithe Overground
- Railway Avenue and King’s Stairs Gardens
- The conversions and blocks along the Surrey Quays and Greenland Dock waterside
The old wharf and granary buildings turned into homes are the signature stock here: brick, exposed timber, open-plan flats with one big cooking wall and a lot of glass. In those the trouble is almost always the kitchen and the bathroom. Cooking oil drifts onto exposed brick and onto the inside of the steel-framed windows, a wipe does nothing, and the hard water finishes the job on the screen and the mixer. The low Georgian and early cottages near the churchyard are the opposite problem: age, not grease. Picture rails, deep skirtings, old window reveals and the tops of fitted cupboards hold dust a check-out has to actually reach, and the original floors need the damp-not-wet method.
Out along the dock edge the stock shifts again to the later riverside blocks around Greenland Dock, much of it built after the Surrey Commercial Docks were filled in. Here it is more familiar: the oven interior, the extractor filter, the carpet edges and any pet marks, and the inside of the balcony door track. Different buildings, the same outcome if the wrong thing is missed. This is where Rotherhithe Village reads differently from its neighbours, being the Pilgrim-and-Brunel conservation core of wharf lofts and cottages rather than the retail bustle of Surrey Quays, the towers around Canada Water, or the warehouse scene over in Bermondsey. For the wider area we also cover Rye Lane end of tenancy in SE15 and the Bermondsey patch next door.
What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time
Plain numbers first, because that is what people ask before anything else.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio (Greenland Dock or dock-side block) | 3-4 hours, 2 cleaners | From £156 |
| 1-bed flat or small conversion | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed wharf conversion or cottage | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed flat or house | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed house or large conversion | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Carpet shampoo add-on | Same visit | £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room |
| Oven add-on | Same visit | £77 single, £110 double |
If you would rather book by time than by a flat rate, it is £30 per cleaner per hour, with kit, products and travel inside the village included. Carpet cleaning as an add-on is £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area in a two-bed, which earns its keep where a tenancy in a wharf flat has run a few years and a vacuum will not lift it. Standalone oven cleaning is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range if the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on. A typical village job is a one or two-bed conversion with carpet in one bedroom and the oven done, and we give you that figure on the phone before anyone is booked.
What moves the price is the building, not a postcode surcharge. A studio in a Greenland Dock block is the £156 line and straightforward. A two-bed wharf conversion with a heavily built extractor, scaled shower glass and slow steel windows is real hours, and we would rather quote it honestly than send too few people and watch it fail the inventory.
Then run the sum the deposit makes you run, because almost nobody does it until after they have failed a check-out and lost the first round. A two-bed clean at £243 set against a deposit of a few thousand pounds is not really a decision. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, our first-time pass rate across these jobs sits at 97%, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. There is a reason agents down here know us: we are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and the same crews come back to the same Rotherhithe streets, which is most of why the pass rate holds.
A job off Elephant Lane, three years in
“We had a two-bed in a wharf conversion just off Elephant Lane for nearly three years, and the thing that scared me was the kitchen. The extractor was solid with old grease behind the grille and the agent had a sharp check-in photo of it clean. Monster sent two cleaners on a Friday, took the housing apart, degreased the lot and did the steel windows, six hours start to finish. The full deposit came back with no argument. After three years I had braced for a fight over it.”
Daniel R., former tenant, Elephant Lane SE16, March 2026
That job is a fair example of the village pattern: a long tenancy, an extractor nobody had touched in years, the steel windows behind it, and an agent who checks against a photo. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake, which it usually does. What turned it was the dated photo set that went out with the invoice alongside the degreasing, the part a do-it-yourself check-out almost never has when the agent leans on a deduction.
Booking it, and the parking nobody warns you about
The booking is short. There is, though, one local thing worth getting right, because it decides whether a clean finishes on time.
- Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the bedroom count and your check-out date. A couple of phone photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen the quote.
- We give you a fixed price on that call, carpet or oven added if you want them, plus the crew size and the hours. End-of-month slots want a week to ten days; mid-month is usually three to five days.
- Flat empty when we arrive, or tell us what is staying and we work around it. We clean to the 57-point checklist and time it to land before your inventory appointment.
- Photo proof at the end, every room, before and after, with the invoice. That is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct.
- Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we are back to fix it free under the re-clean guarantee.
The parking is the part nobody warns you about. The old village is narrow and partly cobbled, the bays around St Marychurch Street and Elephant Lane are tight and time-limited, and many of the riverside conversions have no lift and a single awkward stair up from the street. The clerk almost always books for late morning, between two tenancies, and a crew that cannot find a bay or has to carry kit up three flights loses the hour that should have gone on the extractor. Tell us the parking when you book, whether that is a visitor permit, a bay or a meter, and confirm how we get in: concierge, key safe or an agent drop-off. Sorted in advance it takes the sting out of the day, because a clean that runs late here is a clean that gets marked down.
Questions we get asked
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Rotherhithe Village?
A studio starts at £156, a one-bed is £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Carpet and oven add-ons sit on top. You get a fixed price on the phone before anything is booked, not a guess that moves later.
Do you guarantee the clean against the inventory check?
Yes. If the inventory clerk or your agent flags anything we cleaned, we come back inside the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and put it right at no charge. Our first-time pass rate is 97%, so the return visit is rare, but it is in writing either way.
Can you handle the converted warehouse flats off Rotherhithe Street?
Yes, and they are a lot of what we do here. The extractor housing, the oil haze on exposed brick, and the inside of the big steel-framed windows are where these flats lose a deposit, so we set the hours around exactly those points rather than spreading them evenly.
Is the hard water really a problem for the deposit?
It is the most common bathroom fail in SE16. Thames Water runs Rotherhithe at a minimum of around 253 mg/l of calcium carbonate, so a shower screen, a mixer and a showerhead scale up within one tenancy. We descale them properly so a clerk cannot photograph a cloudy film against the check-in shot.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change what you have to clean?
No. The standard is still the flat at check-out measured against the inventory and the check-in photos, fair wear and tear aside. The Act, live since 1 May 2026, changed how tenancies end, not the bar a deposit adjudicator applies to the clean.
My Rotherhithe flat needs a selective licence. Does that affect the clean?
Indirectly, yes. Southwark’s selective scheme covers the Rotherhithe ward, so a licensed flat is inspected by the council as well as the agent, and the check-out report tends to be fuller and stricter. We clean to that stricter level by default rather than to the easy one.
How long does a Rotherhithe Village clean take?
A studio or one-bed in a dock-side block is usually three to four hours with two cleaners. A two-bed warehouse conversion with a built-up extractor and scaled bathroom glass runs five to seven. We tell you the crew size and the hours when we quote, so there is no creeping bill.
Do I have to empty the flat first?
It is best empty, because the clerk checks inside and on top of cupboards and behind where furniture stood. If you cannot fully clear it, tell us when you book and we will work around what is left and note it, but an empty flat always cleans up to a higher standard.
Do you bring everything with you?
Yes. The cleaners bring all the materials and equipment, including the heavier descaler the SE16 water needs and the right oven and extractor products. You do not provide anything, and you do not need to be in the flat while we work if access is sorted.
Can you clean carpets and the oven at the same visit?
Yes. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area in a two-bed. Ovens are £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range. Booked together with the end of tenancy clean, they are all done in the one visit.
Which streets around the village do you cover?
All of it: St Marychurch Street and the lanes by the church, Rotherhithe Street past The Mayflower, Elephant Lane and Cathay Street, Mayflower Street and Swan Road, Tunnel Road near the Brunel Museum, Railway Avenue, King’s Stairs Gardens, and the conversions and blocks along the Surrey Quays and Greenland Dock waterside.
How do I book and how fast do you reply?
Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the bedroom count and your check-out date. We reply the same working day and confirm the fixed price and the slot before you commit to anything.
What if my deposit is still held after a clean you did?
Send us the clerk’s report. If it flags anything we cleaned, we re-clean it free within 48 hours. If the deduction itself is unfair, the deposit-scheme adjudicator is free to use, and Shelter sets out how a tenant stands.
Do you work weekends in Rotherhithe?
Yes. Weekend and end-of-month slots go quickly down here because tenancies cluster around the same dates, so give us as much notice as you can on the check-out day and we will hold the slot you want.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Rotherhithe Village
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Rotherhithe Village, oven cleaning in Rotherhithe Village and domestic cleaning in Rotherhithe Village.