Start here if you’re moving out of a Royal Docks flat
The Royal Docks took their names from three stretches of water that were once the largest enclosed docks in the world: the Royal Victoria, the Royal Albert and the King George V. Cargo stopped coming through decades ago, and what sits on the quaysides now is glass and brick. ExCeL runs along the north side of the Royal Victoria Dock, the cable car lifts off the water by the Crystal, and London City Airport works the strip between the Albert and the King George V. People rent here in numbers the docks never saw when they were working, which means people also move out, hand a key to an agent and wait to hear whether the deposit comes back whole.
The short version, for anyone mid-move and short of time: we clean rented homes around the Royal Docks to inventory standard, priced by the size of the flat rather than by the hour, with a free re-clean inside 48 hours if the clerk objects. That is the deal. The rest of this page is about why the clean decides the deposit on this particular stretch of water, and about one quirk of the local licensing map that catches landlords out.
Almost everything let here is a new-build flat, and new-builds trip tenants up at check-out in a way older homes do not. The check-in inventory was taken when the flat was handover-fresh, sometimes the week the developer released it, so the bar you are held to is spotless rather than lived-in. A clerk holding that document is comparing your kitchen with the day the worktop came out of its wrapping. Miss it by a fortnight of normal cooking and the deduction writes itself.
The ward line that decides whether your landlord needs a licence
Here is the local oddity worth knowing before anything else. Newham runs one of the strictest licensing regimes in the country, and a line through the Royal Docks decides which side of it your flat falls on. The council holds a borough-wide selective licensing scheme, its third in a row, designated for a full five years from 1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028, and it covers nearly every ordinary single-household let in Newham. Nearly. Two wards are left out, and one of them is Royal Victoria.
That matters because the old Royal Docks ward was split for the 2022 elections into Royal Albert and Royal Victoria. The Royal Victoria ward runs along the north quay of the Royal Victoria Dock, the ExCeL frontage, the Crystal, and across to the Royal Wharf and Britannia Village side. A single-household flat in that ward needs no selective licence, because the council deliberately left Royal Victoria and the Stratford Olympic Park ward out of the scheme. Cross into the Royal Albert ward, on the south and east, or into Custom House behind ExCeL, and the same flat does need one. Same docks, same postcode in places, two different answers.
None of that changes the clean. It changes who your landlord answers to, and it is the sort of thing worth checking on the council’s selective licensing pages if you are unsure which ward your block sits in. A licensed flat tends to come with a landlord who watches condition closely at change-over, because the licence puts the property on the council’s radar and a poor check-out is a record nobody wants.
Shared flats are a separate scheme again. Newham also runs additional HMO licensing across the same wards, in force since 1 January 2023 for five years, so a flat let by the room to three or more people from different households needs a licence under that scheme even where the selective rule does not bite. Plenty of the larger two and three-bed flats round the docks are let that way to people working at ExCeL, the airport or over at Canary Wharf, and the landlords of those flats are the strictest of the lot at check-out.
Same docks, same postcode in places, two different answers.
Why a dockside tower flat fails a check-out
The housing round the Royal Docks is almost all new, and it clusters in a handful of big schemes. Royal Wharf, on the river at the western end by Pontoon Dock and West Silvertown, is the largest, about 3,385 homes with their own high street, a market square and a waterfront park, spread across towers and mansion blocks. Royal Albert Wharf, out east along Albert Basin Way by the Gallions Reach water, runs to more than 1,059 homes on a nine-hectare site. Britannia Village, between them on the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock, is the oldest of the lot, built as an urban village by Wimpey from 1994, so it mixes early-nineties houses and flats with newer blocks alongside. There is some ex-local-authority stock behind Custom House too. The bulk of what gets rented, though, is the dockside tower flat.
New flats clean differently from old houses, and most people moving out of one for the first time underrate it. There are no picture rails or deep skirting to trap dust, which sounds easier and is not. The surfaces are unforgiving instead. Matt-white walls mark with every knock and show each one under the downlights. Engineered boards or vinyl plank streak if you mop them with the wrong thing. Floor-to-ceiling glass onto a balcony shows smears the moment the low light off the dock hits it, and a clerk doing a daytime check-out on a flat that faces the water will catch every one.
Then there are the parts only this kind of flat has. A lot of these homes are open-plan, so grease off the hob drifts onto the living-room side and the underside of the wall units in a way a closed kitchen would have held in. Many have integrated appliances, the oven, hob, fridge and dishwasher hidden behind matching doors, and an inventory expects each one cleaned inside and behind the fascia. Induction hobs scratch if you go at them wrong. Composite sinks and brushed-steel taps water-mark on hard London water and want the right cloth, not a scourer that leaves marks of its own.
Balconies are their own line on a Royal Docks inventory. Nearly every flat here has one looking over the dock or the river, the glass balustrade greys with the salt-tinged air coming off the water, and clerks check it because it was photographed clean at check-in. The communal parts, the lobby, the lifts, the podium gardens, are the building’s job and not your problem. The moment you are inside your own front door, the standard is the developer’s handover standard, and that is high.
Who rents all this is a particular crowd. The DLR runs straight through to Canary Wharf and the Bank, and the Elizabeth line at Custom House reaches the West End in minutes, so a good share of tenants work in the City or the Wharf, took a new flat for the water and the commute, and move the moment a job does. ExCeL fills the nearer blocks during the big shows. A lot of the flats are buy-to-let stock managed by an agent at arm’s length, so the check-out runs strictly to the report because the landlord is not in the room and never sees the place. That is the tenant a clerk is hardest on, because there is no goodwill in the file, only the inventory.
What the inventory clerk actually opens
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 flat 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 leave.
Clerks are predictable about where they start, and in a new dockside flat the order shifts a little from an old house. The oven goes first, because a half-cleaned oven is the quickest deduction in the world to justify with one photo, and an integrated oven behind a matching door is no exception. Then the hob and the extractor over it. Then the glass: the balcony doors, the full-height windows, the splashback, anything that catches the light off the water. Then limescale on the brushed-steel taps and the shower screen, which comes back fast on hard London water. Then the things nobody thinks about day to day, the tops of the units, the trims along the floor, behind the loo, the rubber seal round the fridge.
The checklist breaks the flat down room by room. The kitchen carries the most points: oven inside and out, hob and extractor, every integrated appliance cleaned inside and behind its fascia, cupboards and drawers done on both faces, worktops and splashbacks, the sink and taps descaled. Bathrooms and en-suites are mostly a limescale and glass job, plus the toilet inside and behind, the basin, the bath or shower tray and the floor. Bedrooms and living areas come down to wardrobes and drawers wiped through, skirting and trims, 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 flat: cobwebs, light fittings and downlights, the insides of the windows, glass, mirrors and the balcony balustrade.
Open-plan living adds a job an old flat never had. Grease from the hob settles across the whole room rather than staying at the kitchen end, so we clean the living-room surfaces and the underside of the units as one connected space. The big glazing adds another. Bringing full-height glass and a balcony door to a streak-free finish in daylight is a real skill, and it is the single thing most likely to be marked on a flat that looks straight out over the dock.
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 flats round the docks and across the wider borough 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.
Inventory clerks vary, and the ones working for investor landlords on the dockside tend to be strict, because the flats turn round fast and have to be right for the next tenant at a high rent. Either way the clean has to stand up to a torch and a close look in daylight, so we do not cut the work short.
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.
What the clean costs by the size of the flat
We price by the size of the flat, never by the hour. A studio runs £156, a one-bed flat £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. An hourly clean rewards rushing, and a check-out is the one job you do not want rushed.
The crew stays until the flat is done to the checklist, even when a three-bed townhouse at Royal Wharf over several floors takes most of the day. No clock-watching. If you would rather have cleaners by the hour for a part-job, say a single bad room before a new flatmate moves in, that is £30 per cleaner, but for a full check-out the fixed price is almost always the better deal because the clerk judges the flat as a whole.
What you get for the fixed price is a full top-to-bottom job on an empty flat. Every room: surfaces, skirting and trims, doors and handles, switches, cobwebs, mirrors and glass, the insides of cupboards and wardrobes, the balcony glass, and the floors hoovered and washed throughout. The kitchen and the bathrooms get the heavy work, because that is where the deductions live.
A studio at Royal Albert Wharf and a four-bed townhouse at Royal Wharf are not the same job, and the price says so. The size bands exist because a clerk spends longer in a bigger flat and finds more to mark, so the clean has to be longer too. Tell us the bedroom and bathroom count when you call and the quote is fixed from there, with no surprise on the day.
The add-ons Royal Wharf and Britannia Village tenants book
Some jobs need more than the standard clean, and these get booked alongside it. They are the items a dockside check-in photographs in detail, so they are the items a check-out marks.
- 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 opens, so on most handovers it pays for itself, integrated ovens included.
- 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 check-in photos show clean carpet and yours has had a hard year, which is common in the bedrooms of the older Britannia Village stock.
- Sofas, mattresses and curtains left in a furnished let, brought back by upholstery cleaning with the same hot-water method. Furnished flats are the norm in the investor-owned towers, so this comes up often.
- The balcony glass and the outside of the windows the indoor clean cannot reach, done by exterior window cleaning with water-fed poles, which earns its keep on flats that look straight out over the dock.
Most check-outs round here take at least the oven, and a fair few add the carpets. You do not have to take any of it. We will tell you straight which add-ons your flat genuinely needs against its check-in, rather than selling you the lot.
Deposits, deductions and the law behind them
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 cannot bill you for fair wear and tear, the gradual ageing of paint, flooring and fittings over a tenancy, and they cannot force you to pay for professional cleaning as a blanket condition of the tenancy. Shelter’s guidance puts it plainly: you only have to return the flat as clean as it was when you moved in. In a flat a few years old there is barely any wear and tear to hide behind, which cuts both ways. A scuffed wall after three years in an old house reads as age; the same scuff in a two-year-old dockside flat reads as damage against a near-perfect check-in.
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 flat 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. In a new flat the check-in photos are merciless, so match them.
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; the Deposit Protection Service is one of the three, and 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 flat 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 tenancy 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 flat’s condition and cleanliness on the day you moved in. It is the document every check-out is measured against, and in a brand-new dockside flat handed over showroom-fresh it sets a high bar.
- Fair 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 flat in.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme that licenses ordinary single-household private lets. Newham runs one borough-wide until 31 May 2028, but it leaves out the Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park wards, so whether your flat needs one depends on which side of the dock it sits.
- End of tenancy clean vs deep clean
- An end of tenancy clean is done to inventory standard for handing a flat 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.
In a new flat the check-in photos are merciless, so match them.
Booking the clean and getting a van to the quayside
A few conditions make the clean possible at all. The flat 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 flat 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 flat is fresh when the clerk walks in rather than sitting a week collecting dust off the water. We fit the job to the day the keys are due back, and we do not charge extra for a Saturday or Sunday.
Getting a van to the door is the local wrinkle. The big schemes here have podium-level access and underground parking, so the nearest loading bay is not always next to your core, and on a Royal Wharf or Royal Albert Wharf block you can be a long carry from where a van can stop. The dock roads also clog hard when ExCeL has a big show on, with the DLR and the approach roads to the centre busy from early. If your block is deep inside one of the developments, or your move falls on a show week, tell us when you book and we will plan the parking and the timing around it.
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 flat 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. We also handle one-off resets through our deep cleaning service if you are staying put.
We cover the whole of the docks and the wards behind them, so if your move stays local we clean right round the water. That includes Custom House behind ExCeL, Canning Town up the Lea, and North Woolwich down by the King George V Dock and the airport, all to the same checklist and the same guarantee. The borough overview sits on our end of tenancy cleaning in Newham page.
Questions Royal Docks tenants ask
How much does end of tenancy cleaning in the Royal Docks cost?
The size of the flat 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. Give us the bedroom and bathroom count, say whether you want the oven or carpets adding, and the quote is fixed from there. Saturdays and Sundays cost the same.
Will the clean get my deposit back?
A cleaning charge is the easiest deduction a landlord can write, so taking the flat 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 I need a landlord licence for a flat in the Royal Docks?
It depends which ward your block sits in. Newham runs borough-wide selective licensing until 31 May 2028, but it leaves out the Royal Victoria ward, which covers the north quay of the Royal Victoria Dock, ExCeL, the Crystal and the Royal Wharf side. A single-household flat there needs no selective licence; the same flat in the Royal Albert ward or Custom House does. Shared flats need an HMO licence either way.
Do you clean new-build flats at Royal Wharf and Royal Albert Wharf?
They are most of our work round the docks. New flats are judged against a handover-fresh check-in, so the matt walls, the integrated appliances, the floor-to-ceiling glass and the balcony balustrade all have to come back to that standard. In a flat a couple of years old a clerk has very little wear and tear to write off as age.
Do you clean the integrated oven and the induction hob?
Yes, and they need the right approach. An integrated oven is cleaned inside and behind its matching door, and an induction hob is brought back to a clear finish without the scourer that would scratch it. The oven is the first thing most clerks open, so it is worth doing properly whether it is freestanding or built in.
Can you get a van to my block by the dock, and is parking a problem?
Usually it works, with a bit of planning. The big schemes have podium access and underground parking, so the loading point is not always next to your core, and the dock roads clog when ExCeL has a show on. Tell us your block and your date when you book and we will plan the parking and timing around it.
What do you need from me before the clean?
An empty flat, your things out, the power and hot water still on, and the fridge and freezer switched off in time to defrost. If a shared flat is coming back one room at a time as flatmates leave, flag it, because a bedroom cleaned a fortnight before the inspection nearly always wants a second pass.
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 the concierge or with us 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 balcony glass and the windows?
Yes. The inside of the windows and the glass are part of the standard clean, and the balcony balustrade gets done because it was photographed clean at check-in. For the outside of the glass on the higher floors we use exterior window cleaning with water-fed poles, which is the part that shows most on a flat facing the water.
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 docks seem 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 the Royal Docks?
We cover the docks and the wards behind them. As well as the quayside schemes we clean Custom House behind ExCeL, Canning Town up the Lea and North Woolwich by the airport, all to the same 57-point checklist and the same 48-hour guarantee.