Royal Victoria Dock’s end of tenancy cleaning team

The clerk who checks out a Royal Victoria Dock flat looks at the balcony glass before anything else. Floor-to-ceiling panes at Hoola, Royal Wharf and the Western Gateway blocks throw back the dock and the water, so a single smeared pane on a north-facing living room reads like a fault the second the light hits it. That is the line that gets costed here, not skirting or coving. I am John, I run the move-out cleans across the Royal Docks, and we work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist at £30 per hour per cleaner, from £156 for a studio, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind every job. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover E16 across the north side of the water, from Britannia Village and Tidal Basin Road through the Royal Wharf township down to Pontoon Dock. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Newham.

Why the glass, not the grout, decides a dock deposit

Almost every flat here is modern. Britannia Village went up between 1994 and 2000 as low-rise Wimpey and Peabody blocks on the south-west corner of the water, the ExCeL exhibition centre opened on the north quay in 2000, and Royal Wharf, the Oxley and Ballymore township at the east end, has put roughly 3,385 homes and over ten thousand residents on the map since 2014. Hoola’s two towers on Tidal Basin Road topped out in 2017. There is no period stock to speak of. No cornicing to dust, barely a window that opens on a hinge. So the deductions land somewhere quite different from an inland terrace, and if you clean a dock flat like a terrace you will miss the four things a clerk actually costs.

Those four are the floor-to-ceiling glazing and the balcony screen, the induction hob ceramic, the integrated-appliance kickplates, and the seals around the wet rooms. Every one of them is a hard, reflective, close-inspected surface, and every one shows a rushed clean under the dock light. A clerk runs a fingertip across the living-room glass at chest height, looking for the chalky film a cheap window spray leaves. They tilt the shower screen to the light. They lift the dishwasher kickplate. None of that takes long, and all of it moves money.

Clean a dock flat like an inland terrace and you will miss the four things a clerk actually costs.

Here is the maths that makes it matter. A two-bed off the Hoola lift lets for somewhere around £2,000 to £2,400 a month; a Western Gateway two-bed sits a little higher. Deposits are capped at five weeks’ rent under the tenancy deposit rules on gov.uk, so on a £2,300 flat that is about £2,653 held in a scheme. Losing £150 of it to one streaky pane is the single most common deduction we are called in to prevent. The clean costs a fraction of what is at stake, which is the whole argument for booking one.

The one Newham rule that treats this ward differently

Newham runs one of the strictest licensing regimes in England, and there is a quirk here worth knowing. The borough-wide selective licensing scheme runs from 1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028, but it covers 22 of the 24 wards. Royal Victoria ward, which takes in Royal Victoria Dock, is one of the two wards left out; Stratford Olympic Park is the other. The borough’s additional HMO scheme, which runs to the end of 2027, excludes the same two wards. So most landlords at the dock do not need the selective licence their counterparts a few streets north in Custom House do.

Two things still bite, though. The national mandatory HMO licence applies everywhere, including here, wherever a property is a larger shared house of five or more people from two or more households. And the licensing position changes nothing about the check-out itself. The agents working Royal Wharf, Hoola and the Britannia Village blocks run the same five-week deposit, the same scheme protection, and the same inventory-clerk sign-off whether the flat is licensed or not. I mention the ward exclusion because landlords ask, and getting it wrong on either side causes grief, but it never softens the clean we are booked to do.

Newham’s own licensing pages set out exactly which streets sit inside and outside the scheme, though their site tends to block automated lookups, so the quickest check is usually a phone call to the agent or to us.

What 1 May 2026 did to the churn at the dock

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 came into force on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, every assured shorthold tenancy has converted to a periodic one, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting out a fixed term.

The cleaning obligation did not change. Not one line of it. What changed is timing, and timing is the thing that already ran hot here.

The dock was a high-churn patch before the act, full of one-year company lets, ExCeL and City Airport workers, and international renters who move on a job rather than a calendar. Let people leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and the move-outs get more frequent and far harder to predict, so the slots you actually want get taken sooner. The practical takeaway is dull and it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you think you need to, because on a busy dock week the good goods-lift slots go first.

The 57 things, from the induction hob to the MVHR grille

The full checklist comes with the job, or we walk you through it first. It runs front door to boiler cupboard. Here is the shape of it in a typical dock flat.

The kitchen, where the integrated appliances eat the hours

Most of these kitchens are integrated end to end: a Bosch or Siemens dishwasher, a Neff or Siemens induction hob, a built-in combi oven, a fan-vented hood. We pull the dishwasher kickplate, clean the gasket and the salt port, descale the spray arm, scrub the sump filter, and refit the plate flush so it sits as it should. The hob ceramic gets a cream cleaner and a fresh blade, worked slowly, because black induction glass shows every baked-on ring and a clerk will drag a fingernail along the burner edge. The hood filter goes through a degreaser bath. The oven trim and door glass are split and cleaned both sides. Cupboard interiors, shelves and the corner carousel where the spilt rice always ends up, all wiped. Drawer runners vacuumed out.

Bathrooms and wet rooms

Royal Wharf and Hoola wet rooms tend to come with chrome rainfall showers and frameless glass screens, and the water at this end of E16 is hard, so scale is the enemy. A descaler and a soft brush clear the head holes and the screen; the finishing pass is the one the clerk checks, a fingertip pull across the glass for chalky residue. We cut back and treat the silicone seal where mould has got inside it. Toilet under the rim, behind the cistern, down to the floor seal. Mirrors finished without the smear line that LED bathroom lighting throws straight back at you.

Bedrooms and the open-plan living space

The floor-to-ceiling windows are the showpiece and the time sink. We do both sides where the balcony reaches, top to bottom, microfibre then a squeegee finish. Skirting wiped, switch plates and door-frame edges done, wardrobe interiors and rails hoovered out. Bedroom carpets, where the flat has them, and most Royal Wharf bedrooms are carpeted while the living space is usually engineered oak, get a deep vacuum and a stain treatment if one is needed.

Everything else in the flat

The newer Hoola and Royal Wharf flats run a mechanical heat-recovery ventilation system, and the visible grille faces gather a grey lint the clerk will notice; we brush and wipe the faces, though we do not lift the units. Door handles, switch plates, the thermostat, the intercom handset and the access-card reader inside the front door all get cleaned. Balcony glass and balustrade are in scope; the balcony floor is usually a sweep, but a tiled one gets mopped if the inventory notes it.

One Britannia Village tenant put the difference plainly after a four-year let on Fishguard Way:

“We’d been in the flat four years and I honestly thought the shower screen was ruined, permanently cloudy from the hard water. Two cleaners spent a morning on it and it came back clear. The oven and the hob I’d given up on too. Peabody’s clerk passed it with no deductions and we had the full deposit back in a fortnight. Best money we spent on the whole move.”
Aisha, Britannia Village E16, February 2026

What 275 ppm does to a frameless shower screen

Thames Water supplies E16, and the hardness here sits around 275 parts per million of calcium carbonate, which is firmly in the hard band and well above the national average. You can read the detail on the Thames Water hardness pages. That number is the deposit mechanism in every dock bathroom. Calcium sets on the rainfall head, the frameless screen and the tap bases faster than tenants expect, a cloth does nothing to it, and once it has bonded to chrome it is slow, careful work to shift.

It is why the shower head and the dishwasher spray arm are the two most-descaled items on the checklist, and why we use a scale remover and a soft brush rather than anything that scours the finish. A scoured screen is a deduction in its own right. The clerk who tilts that screen to the dock light is checking for exactly the film 275 ppm leaves behind, and a proper descale is the difference between a pass and a costed line.

The dock block by block, and how the stock changes

Royal Victoria Dock is a long strip of water with different housing at each end, and the clean shifts with it. We work the north side and the Pontoon Dock corner most, and the stock runs roughly like this.

The Britannia Village and Western Gateway end

The south-west corner is the oldest of the modern stock: the 1990s Britannia Village low-rise around Fishguard Way, Wesley Avenue and Evelyn Road, and the Western Gateway blocks nearer the water. These are the longer lets, families and settled renters, so the build-up is real: years of scale in the wet room, a hob nobody stripped between tenancies, dust deep in the ventilation faces. We win these on the slow work, not on anything clever.

Hoola, Royal Wharf and the new-build towers

Along Tidal Basin Road and east into the Royal Wharf township, from Mariner’s Quarter through to the Clipper Building, the flats are newer, higher-churn and heavier on integrated kit and glass. Company lets and international renters dominate, tenancies are short, and a flat can hand back barely a year after the last clean. A Royal Wharf tenant on a corporate let summed the pattern up for us:

“My company relocated me at six weeks’ notice and the two-bed had to be handed back to JLL clean. I was never going to manage the balcony glass or the induction hob myself in the time. Monster collected the keys from the concierge, did it in a day, sent me the photos, and the deposit came straight back. I did not set foot in the flat again.”
Daniel, Royal Wharf E16, April 2026

Pontoon Dock, Silvertown and the western infill

South and west, past the cable car, the Barrier Park flats off North Woolwich Road and the growing Silvertown regeneration around Pontoon Dock, where Lendlease is delivering thousands of new homes, feed a steady flow of new-build hand-backs. The Crystal building on the dock’s western edge, now City Hall and the home of the Greater London Authority since 2022, is the landmark most tenants use to place themselves.

These waterside blocks are close cousins but not the same job, and they each get their own page. If your flat is really over the ward line, we also cover Custom House, Canning Town, Silvertown and North Woolwich, and the dockside siblings Royal Wharf and Pontoon Dock. Not sure which side of the ward boundary you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you.

What it costs, and the deposit maths behind it

That is our standard Royal Docks pricing, kit, products and travel inside E16 included. The dock is not a premium-priced patch for us, whatever the asking rents suggest, and we quote on the bedroom count, not on what the flat lets for. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole carpeted two-bed. An integrated oven is £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a 90cm range. Hourly cover, for the rare part-clean or dilapidations job that does not fit a flat rate, is £30 per cleaner.

Now run it the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed at £243 to protect roughly £2,653 held in a scheme is not really a decision. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk or the agent flags anything we missed inside 48 hours, we send a team back free, provided you tell us in that window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate at the dock sits near 97%, but the guarantee is the real point, because a failed check-out on a five-week deposit is not a small thing to absorb. There is a reason the agents here know the name on our invoice: we are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

It is worth being clear about which job you are actually booking, because the words get muddled and only one of them is written against an inventory.

End-of-tenancy clean

Built to pass the inventory and get a deposit back, flat empty, judged against the check-in report, with the 48-hour guarantee on it. This is the one you want when the keys are going back.

Deep clean

A top-to-bottom reset of a home you are staying in. No clerk, no report, no fixed standard to hit, so the spec is different from a move-out.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance, priced by the hour, to keep a lived-in flat on top of itself.

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 marked against, which is exactly why we clean to it.

The porter, the goods lift and the show-week squeeze

This is the bit that catches new tenants out, and it has nothing to do with cleaning. Hoola, Royal Wharf and the Western Gateway blocks are access-card buildings with a concierge desk. The clean has to be booked against a porter’s slot. The bin store needs a fob. The goods lift usually needs booking the day before, and most porters will turn away a van that arrives at 7am with nothing logged on their sheet.

We sort this with the concierge directly because we know how their sheets run, and we never leave a van at the front door of a Royal Wharf block with no slot booked. Give us the porter’s name and we handle the goods-lift booking, or we phone the desk ourselves if you would rather.

ExCeL show weeks are the other wrinkle. When a big trade show is on at Custom House, the serviced blocks nearby fill their porter slots and parking tightens across the whole dock. The residential blocks, Royal Wharf and Hoola, can usually still take a goods-lift booking at a couple of days’ notice, but a full week is safer than a day when a show is running. Parking, when the porter cannot give us a bay, falls back to the controlled zone and the time-limited bays on Tidal Basin Road, and we do not pass those costs on to you on a flat-rate clean.

We never leave a van at the front door of a Royal Wharf block with no slot booked.

Booking it, start to finish

It is a short process and most of it happens on the phone.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Give us the postcode, the bedroom count and the date the keys go back, and mention anything the check-in report marked as new so we can match it.
2. We quote against the table above and confirm whether the oven, carpet or balcony glass need adding.
3. We book the slot and, for Royal Wharf or Hoola, take the porter’s name and the goods-lift booking, or phone the concierge for you.
4. The team works the 57-point list at the agreed slot and sends a finished-clean photo set to the email on file. Most dock jobs are key-collection from the desk, so you do not need to be there.
5. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back free. The usual callbacks are induction hobs and shower screens, and they turn round inside a day.

Empty is best when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared. A single piece left for the next tenant can be worked around, but the more that stays, the less complete the clean can be, and the clerk marks what they can see.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning at Royal Victoria Dock?

From £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. Carpet shampoo adds £36 a bedroom or £115 for a whole carpeted two-bed. An integrated oven is £77 single, £110 double. Hourly cover, where the job does not fit a flat rate, is £30 per cleaner.

Do you cover Royal Wharf, Hoola and Britannia Village specifically?

Yes. Royal Wharf, Hoola Buildings East and West, the Britannia Village low-rise, Western Gateway and the Pontoon Dock blocks are all standard E16 work for us. We deal with the concierge directly to book the goods lift, and most jobs are key-collection from the desk.

What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?

If the inventory clerk or the letting agent flags anything we missed within 48 hours of the clean, we send a team back free to redo those items. It is included in every end of tenancy booking, written into the confirmation email, and needed on only a small share of jobs, which is how we hold a 97% first-time pass rate.

Does Newham licensing apply at Royal Victoria Dock?

The borough-wide selective licensing scheme runs from 1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028, but Royal Victoria ward is one of only two wards left out, along with Stratford Olympic Park. The additional HMO scheme excludes the same two wards. So most landlords at the dock do not need those licences, though the national mandatory HMO licence still applies to larger shared houses, and it changes nothing about the check-out standard.

How long does an end of tenancy clean take at the dock?

A studio is around three hours. A one-bed is four to five. A two-bed at Royal Wharf or Hoola is typically five to seven hours with two cleaners, because the floor-to-ceiling glass and the integrated kitchen are the slow parts. A three-bed runs most of a day.

Is the water at Royal Victoria Dock hard?

Yes. Thames Water supplies E16 and the hardness sits around 275 parts per million of calcium carbonate, well into the hard band. That is why the rainfall shower head and the dishwasher spray arm are the two most-descaled items on the 57-point list. We use a scale remover and a soft brush, never a wire pad that would scour the finish.

Are bedroom carpets included, or an extra?

The dry vacuum is included. A hot-water-extraction carpet clean is the £36-per-bedroom add-on. Most Royal Wharf bedrooms are carpeted, while the open-plan living space is usually engineered oak that does not need shampoo. The inventory will say which the flat has.

What about the balcony glazing?

The balcony screen interior is done on every floor as part of the clean. The outer face is included up to the third floor where the balcony gives safe access; higher up, the outside face is handled by the building’s own window-cleaning contractor, and the agent can tell you when it was last done.

Do I need to be at the flat?

No. Most Royal Wharf and Hoola jobs are key-collection from the concierge. We pick up at the agreed slot, work the list, and either hand the keys back to the porter or to the agent. A finished-clean photo set goes to the email on file, so you have the evidence without being there.

Which deposit scheme will my landlord use?

The three government-backed schemes for England and Wales are the Deposit Protection Service, MyDeposits and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. Dock blocks split between all three. If a dispute reaches adjudication, the clerk’s check-out report and our dated photo set are the two pieces of evidence the adjudicator weighs.

How do I book around an ExCeL show week?

Tell us early. When a big trade show is on at Custom House the serviced blocks near ExCeL fill their porter slots and parking tightens across the dock. Royal Wharf and Hoola are residential, so they can usually still take a goods-lift slot at a couple of days’ notice, but a full week is safer than a day during a show.

What if the flat has been empty for months?

Common at the Royal Wharf end, where some overseas owners list and relist. An empty flat carries heavy dust on the ventilation grilles and a stale trap smell, but no kitchen grease and no shower scale. We adjust the spec on site, and a standard end of tenancy price usually still applies because the deep work is roughly equivalent.

What happens if the deposit goes to a dispute?

If the agent refuses part of the deposit and you cannot agree, the protection scheme runs a free adjudication. The clerk’s check-out report and our finished-clean photo set are the two things the adjudicator weighs, and we will email a copy of the photos to the scheme directly, at no extra charge. Shelter’s guidance walks through the steps at england.shelter.org.uk.

How do I pay, and do you take a deposit up front?

Bank transfer on completion or card over the phone, invoiced the same day the team finishes. We do not ask for a deposit up front on a standard end of tenancy booking.