In a Smithfield warehouse loft the inventory clerk goes to the exposed brick first, phone torch held flat against the wall, because reclaimed mortar joints hold a grey dust that stays invisible until the light rakes across it. Then the whole bay lights up. That single habit decides more deposits here than the oven does, so the clean has to be built for the person holding the torch, not for a tidy-looking flat. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, a London firm working since 2014, and we run move-out cleans across Smithfield and the EC1A City fringe at £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.
Last updated June 2026. We cover the EC1A Smithfield core and its fringe, and the Barbican and Farringdon edge into EC1M and EC1N. This page sits inside the Westminster and central-London directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Westminster.
The clerk, the torch and the wall nobody dusts
Start with how the deposit is actually decided, because almost nobody does, and it is the whole game. When you moved into a Smithfield conversion, a clerk walked it and wrote a check-in report describing every surface, usually with the words “clean to a professional standard” against the kitchen and bathroom. Those words were true that day, because the flat had just been turned over professionally. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares the flat against that report, line by line, and anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a free Sunday rarely gets you there.
The building type is what makes this pocket different, so the deductions are different too. There is almost no ordinary period-house stock inside EC1A. What you get instead is old market and commercial buildings turned into loft apartments: exposed brick, ducting and conduit run open across high ceilings, polished concrete or engineered timber underfoot, and tall metal-framed windows that were never meant to be domestic. Every one of those surfaces holds grime in its own way, and every one is photographed on its own at check-in.
Exposed brick is the one that catches people out. The rough face of a reclaimed brick and the recessed mortar line trap a fine dust a tenant cannot see straight on. The clerk can. So can the tops of the ducts and conduit runs, high and open and dead in the eye line of a raised camera, because the ceilings are double height and nobody has touched those surfaces in two years. A rushed clean treats them as walls and skips the tops. The clerk does not.
The chargeable list in a Smithfield flat is fairly settled once you have done a run of them: brick and mortar dust, duct and beam tops, scale film on the big glazing and in the bathroom, oven and hob grease, tacky hood filters, scuffed steel and skirtings, dusty trickle vents, and scale around taps and screens. We work through that list before the clerk ever arrives, on a 57-point agent-approved checklist built backwards from what the EC1 clerks inspect. Across our work we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits, and our 97% first-time pass rate comes from treating each point as its own task rather than a general going-over.
That single habit decides more deposits here than the oven does.
Which authority actually governs an EC1A move-out
People get the council wrong here, and it matters. Smithfield sits on the north-west corner of the Square Mile, so the authority is the City of London Corporation, not Westminster and not Islington, even though the Islington boundary is a couple of streets north up St John Street. Getting that right saves you writing to the wrong town hall about waste, parking or licensing.
The licensing position is unusual, and it is not what tenants assume. The City runs mandatory HMO licensing only, for houses or flats let to five or more people who are not one household. It has no selective licensing and no additional HMO scheme, and the Corporation has said it has no plans to bring one in. The reason is simple: this is a financial district with very little private rented housing, so the borough-wide schemes you find in Barking or Ealing would have almost nothing to bite on. For most Smithfield lets, a one or two-bed loft with a couple of professionals, no property licence applies. That does not change the clean, but the paperwork around your tenancy is lighter than someone moving in from a licensed outer-London borough might expect.
The conservation side is where the Corporation does shape a move-out. Cloth Fair, the market buildings and the streets around St Bartholomew-the-Great sit in a tightly managed conservation area, so van access and bulky-waste around West Smithfield and Charterhouse Street is not casual. We sort and remove our own waste off-site rather than leaving bin bags on a listed street.
What 1 May 2026 changed for a City-worker let
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 out a fixed term.
Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The check-in benchmark is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing. Smithfield was already a fast-churn pocket, full of one-year lets and short professional tenancies tied to City jobs, and letting people leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed date makes the move-outs more frequent and far less predictable. The practical takeaway is dull and pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want will be gone if you leave it late.
Your deposit still sits in a government-backed scheme, usually the Tenancy Deposit Scheme or mydeposits on a City let. If the check-out photos show the flat handed back worse than the check-in report, the landlord can claim, and a warehouse loft with all that open surface gives a clerk plenty to photograph. The line that matters is fair wear and tear versus a cleaning shortfall: a scuffed steel column or a faded wall is wear a landlord cannot deduct for, but a duct top thick with dust or a scaled shower screen is a shortfall, and that distinction is where deposits are won and lost. If you disagree with a deduction you raise a free dispute through the scheme, and Shelter’s deposit-dispute guidance sets out the steps.
The 57 things we work through in a loft
End of tenancy is the hand-back clean, the one measured against your check-in inventory. It is a different job from a deep clean you would book to keep living somewhere, and different again from regular upkeep. Every Smithfield booking runs to the same 57-point checklist, the same list the major EC1 clerks inspect against. One flat, one team, one fixed scope. Here is the shape of it, room by room.
The kitchen, usually open-plan into the living space
The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks go in a soaking tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals are all done. Then the rest of the room. Hob or induction plate, control knobs and the extractor hood degreased, its metal filters soaked until they clear, because a wiped filter still tacky is a routine clerk check in an open-plan loft. Every cupboard inside and out, fronts, handles and plinths. Fridge and freezer through once defrosted, dishwasher and washing machine including the door seal a clerk opens first. Sink, mixer tap and aerator descaled, splashback polished, grout scrubbed. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind are done, then put back.
The bathroom, where hard water shows fastest
Scale comes off the shower screen, tiles, taps and fittings first, chrome polished, no chalky film left on the glass. Then the toilet, basin and bath cleaned and disinfected, behind and around the pan included. Shower screen both sides, tracks and sealant bead. Mirror and cabinet, and behind them where they lift off. Extractor grille and vent louvres cleared. Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin.
The surfaces a warehouse conversion adds
The part a normal flat lacks, and where a rushed clean fails:
- Exposed brick: mortar joints and the rough brick face dust-brushed and vacuumed, the grey dust a torch finds across the wall
- Duct and conduit tops: the top faces of visible ducting and pipe runs dusted, the eye-line surfaces in a high ceiling
- Steel and beams: feature steelwork, columns and original beams wiped down where reachable safely
- Industrial glazing: the tall metal-framed windows cleaned and de-filmed inside, frames, bars and beads wiped, scale haze taken off
- Deep reveals: window sills, the deep reveals these thick walls create, and any internal blinds or shutters dusted
- Trickle vents: window and wall vents dusted and cleared, a standard check-out flag
- Mezzanine edges: internal stairs, mezzanine lips and metal balustrades on split-level lofts cleaned, plus the high ledges these double-height spaces are full of
Then everything the rooms share: doors both faces with frames and handles, skirtings wiped throughout including behind where furniture stood, walls spot-cleaned where the finish allows, switches, sockets and the entryphone handset wiped, built-in storage cleared inside and out, floors done to the right method for concrete, engineered board or stone, carpets vacuumed where fitted, cobwebs out of the high corners, bins emptied, and a final walk-through photographed room by room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.
The handful of things we get re-called for
We do not get many re-clean callouts, but when a clerk does send one back here it is almost always the same short list, nearly all tied to the building: brick that looked fine head-on but lit up under the torch, hard-water haze creeping back onto the big windows, duct and beam tops missed above head height, hood filters still tacky, or surface mould in shower sealant. Our 48-hour re-clean guarantee exists for exactly these: if your clerk flags any cleaning point within 48 hours of our visit, we come back and put it right at no charge, against the same checklist the clerk used.
What Thames Water hardness does to warehouse glazing
Smithfield is supplied by Thames Water, drawn off the chalk under this part of London, and the water runs very hard, around 290 to 300 parts per million of calcium carbonate. That one detail loses more deposits in a loft than almost anything except the oven, and the reason is the glass. These conversions are known for enormous metal-framed windows, usually the single largest surface in the flat, so any chalky scale film is brutal in flat afternoon light and is one of the first things a clerk flags on a check-out.
Anywhere water sits or sprays scales up the same way: the kitchen mixer, the shower screen, the kettle, the dishwasher. We take it off the glazing with a proper scale remover rather than a quick wipe, because a wipe just moves the film around on a window that size and it returns before the clerk arrives. The clerk checks for it, running a thumbnail down a tap and looking at the shower screen edge-on against the light. Scale set into chrome is slow work, so where a fitting cannot be fully rescued we photograph it before we start, dated, because a clerk cannot bill a tenant for scale that was already there at check-in.
A wipe just moves the film around on a window that size and it returns before the clerk arrives.
Specialist floors sit outside the scrub-and-go work: polished concrete, engineered timber and stone each take their own method, which is what the floor cleaning service covers, and the exterior face of that industrial glazing is a separate window cleaning job folded into the same visit when the inventory asks for it.
Smithfield block by block: the stock shifts street to street
Smithfield is small, but the housing is not uniform, and the clerk looks for different things depending on which building you are in. Think of it in three kinds of stock.
The warehouse and office-to-residential lofts
This is the bulk of what we do here. Old market, warehouse and commercial buildings around Long Lane, Hayne Street, Charterhouse Street and West Smithfield turned into loft apartments, plus office-to-residential conversions on the fringe. Exposed brick, open ducting, polished concrete, and that tall industrial glazing. Most are open-plan one and two-beds on short professional tenancies, which is why the £207 and £243 tiers below carry most of our Smithfield work. These are the flats the checklist above was written for.
The period fabric on Cloth Fair and the Barts side
North and east of the market the fabric gets much older. Cloth Fair and Cloth Court hold listed period houses, and number 41-42 Cloth Fair is generally reckoned the oldest house in the City, built between 1597 and 1614 and one of the very few to survive the Great Fire, because it sat inside the priory walls of St Bartholomew-the-Great, the Norman church next door. Round the corner are the flats towards St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Bartholomew Close and Newbury Street. On this older stock a clerk inspects slowly, so we plan extra time, and nothing aggressive goes near original timber, plaster or panelling.
The Charterhouse and Barbican-edge flats
West and north again, Charterhouse Square and the streets by the London Charterhouse hold mansion-block and period flats around the garden square, and the Barbican-edge flats run off the top of the area into EC1M. These are more conventional homes than the lofts, and the clean is the same fixed-price job by flat size; only the add-ons change if the inventory lists carpets. The Farringdon and Barbican stations and the Elizabeth line pull the tenant churn through all of it, the other reason move-outs here run tight.
Not sure which patch you are in, or whether your street counts as EC1A? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds, and whether your handover timing is workable.
We work the streets around Smithfield too, which matters when your next flat is one over: the Clerkenwell end of tenancy cleaning area just north up St John Street, the Farringdon end of tenancy cleaning streets on the western edge, and the Barbican end of tenancy cleaning flats on the northern fringe.
What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until check-out day
Prices are fixed by flat size, not invented per job, so you know the figure before we arrive. These are full prices, kit, products and travel into the City included, and Smithfield runs at our standard London rate, not a premium one.
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio loft or flat | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | £156 |
| 1-bed loft (Long Lane, Hayne Street) | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | £207 |
| 2-bed conversion or Charterhouse flat | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | £243 |
| 3-bed loft or period flat | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | £339 |
| 4-bed or split-level loft | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | £425 |
| Specific part-jobs, by the hour | As needed | £30 per cleaner |
Carpet shampoo, where a loft has carpeted bedrooms or rugs the inventory lists, is an add-on: £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Oven cleaning is already in the end-of-tenancy price; as a standalone job it is £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double, and £114 for a 90cm range. Those tiers assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or a place not deep-cleaned in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. No surprise lines on the invoice.
Now run the sum the deposit makes you run, the one most tenants only do after they have failed a check-out. A two-bed loft clean at £243 against a City deposit that often runs past £3,000 is not really a decision. There is a reason the agents here know us: we are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, the firms that manage EC1 conversion stock among them.
It helps to be clear which of three jobs you are booking.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- Built to pass the check-in inventory and get a deposit back, the flat empty, the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 per hour per cleaner or the fixed tier for your flat size.
- Deep clean
- A deep clean resets a home you are keeping. It is lived-in work with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing upkeep from a domestic cleaning visit, weekly or fortnightly, from £22 an hour on a retainer.
A Cloth Fair job from March
“Moved out of a converted loft off Cloth Fair after two years, just me, media job, the sort of hours where the flat never really got cleaned properly. The one thing the clerk had circled at check-in was the exposed brick and the ducting above the kitchen, plus a hard-water haze on those huge windows I could never shift. Monster sent two cleaners, spent most of the time on exactly those, brought the brick and duct dust right down and got the glass properly clear. The clerk signed it off the next day with nothing held back on cleaning. Deposit back in full.”
Priya, Cloth Fair EC1A, March 2026
That is a fair example of the Smithfield pattern: a busy professional tenant, surfaces a normal flat does not have, and an agent who checks against a detailed check-in report. What turned it was the dated photos of the brick, ducts and glazing that went out with the invoice, the part a self-done clean almost never has.
Booking it around the market and the build site
A short process. No long forms.
- Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your postcode, flat size and check-out date.
- We give you the fixed price on the spot and confirm whether your handover window is workable, because City turnarounds are often tight.
- We confirm the slot in writing, timed to finish before your inventory appointment.
- We clean to the 57-point checklist and photograph every room before we leave.
- If the clerk flags any cleaning point within 48 hours, we return and fix it at no charge.
Two honest local notes. Access and parking in the Square Mile are not casual and the conservation rules mean you cannot leave waste out, so tell us the access arrangement when you book, whether that is a concierge, a key safe or an agent drop-off. And there is a live building site on your doorstep: the General Market and the old Poultry Market are being restored for the London Museum, the former Museum of London, which opens on 28 November 2026, so parts of Smithfield carry construction dust that settles on ledges and brick faster than tenants expect. That is exactly what a clerk notices on a final inspection, one more reason to time the clean close to your check-out. If you would rather move and clean on one booking, we also run removals.
Questions we get asked
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Smithfield?
It is fixed by flat size: £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. Specific part-jobs by the hour are £30 per cleaner. Smithfield runs at our standard London rate, not a premium, and you get the exact figure for your flat on the call with nothing added afterwards.
Which council covers Smithfield, and does it license rentals?
Smithfield is EC1A, inside the City of London, so the authority is the City of London Corporation, not Westminster or Islington. The City runs mandatory HMO licensing only, for flats let to five or more people from different households, with no selective or additional scheme. Most Smithfield lets are one or two-bed flats needing no property licence.
Do you clean exposed brick and ductwork in warehouse conversions?
Yes, and it is one of the main reasons people here call us specifically. Exposed brick, mortar joints and the tops of visible ducts and beams hold a fine dust that a clerk’s torch finds instantly. We dust-brush and vacuum those surfaces as separate checklist tasks rather than treating them as ordinary walls, because that is where a loft check-out is most often lost.
Will you get the hard-water film off the big industrial windows?
Yes. Smithfield is on Thames Water very-hard supply, around 290 to 300 ppm, so those large metal-framed windows scale up with a chalky haze that shows in flat light. We descale the glass with a scale remover rather than wiping it, because on glazing that size a wipe just spreads the film and it returns within hours.
What is the 57-point checklist?
It is the room-by-room list we clean against, built backwards from what EC1 inventory clerks actually inspect. Each point is a separate task, from oven interiors to trickle vents to duct tops, so nothing gets a general wipe instead of being done properly. The full list comes with the job.
What does the 48-hour re-clean guarantee cover?
If your inventory clerk flags any cleaning point within 48 hours of our visit, we come back and put it right at no charge, against the same checklist the clerk used. It covers cleaning shortfalls, not new mess made after we have handed the flat back, and not damage or wear that is not ours.
Can you work to a tight same-day handover around Farringdon?
Often, but not always. Flats around Farringdon and the market turn over fast because of the Elizabeth line interchange, so check-outs are frequently booked tight against a new tenant moving in. Tell us your timings when you call and we will say honestly whether the window is workable rather than promising and rushing it.
Do you guarantee I get my full deposit back?
No honest cleaner can promise that, because deposits also cover damage and wear we are not responsible for. What we can say is that our 97% first-time pass rate is on the cleaning portion, and we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits by closing the cleaning list first.
Is oven cleaning included in the price?
Yes. A full oven strip and degrease, including splitting the door glass so the film between the panes comes out, is part of the standard end-of-tenancy price. As a standalone job it is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range.
Do you clean the period flats and mansion blocks around Charterhouse Square?
Yes. We cover the period and mansion-block stock around Charterhouse Square, the listed houses on Cloth Fair, and the Barts-side flats, as well as the warehouse lofts. The clean is the same fixed-price job by flat size; on the older fabric we plan extra time and keep anything aggressive away from original timber and plaster.
How do I prove the flat was clean if my landlord disputes it?
We photograph every room before we leave, and the photos are dated. If a deduction is disputed you can raise it free through your deposit scheme’s adjudication, and Shelter explains the process. Dated professional before-photos are usually the cheapest evidence you can put forward.
How far in advance should I book?
Smithfield tenancies turn over quickly and end-of-month dates fill first, so two to three days’ notice is sensible and more for a month-end slot. We can sometimes manage next-day at short notice, but the tighter the handover, the more it pays to call early.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Smithfield
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Smithfield, oven cleaning in Smithfield and domestic cleaning in Smithfield.