Soho flats above shops, bars and restaurants
Almost every rented home in Soho sits on top of something else: a café on Old Compton Street, a bar on Dean Street, a shop on Berwick Street. Clearing one of those flats at the end of a tenancy is a job we price by bedrooms, from £174 for a studio to £443 for four, with the oven and carpets as add-ons.
Last updated October 2026.
Westminster’s conservation area audit for Soho sets out how this came about. The streets were first laid out with terraced houses, many of them lived in by single families, and homes and small workshops often shared the same building. In the 19th century the old houses became overcrowded and multi-occupied, and later many gave way to shops, offices, restaurants and bars.
Today, the audit says, residents are more likely to live in refurbished older buildings than in anything new. In practice that means a flat on the first, second or third floor of a narrow Georgian house, reached by a street door between two shopfronts, with a staircase that has not changed much in two hundred years.
Meard Street has one of the most complete groups of 18th-century houses in the area, with original ironwork. Many Soho buildings front straight onto the pavement, without the railings and basement areas you see in squares elsewhere in the West End. For a cleaner, the narrow stairs and small landings set the pace: everything comes up by hand, and each room is cleaned from the top of the building down.
Flats over restaurants and busy streets tend to collect a film of grease and traffic dust on sills, frames and window runners. We clean the inside of every window and frame and wash the sills and runners as part of the standard clean.
Model dwellings, mansion flats and Kemp House
Not all of Soho’s homes are converted houses. In the late 19th century the worst slums were cleared and replaced with blocks of model dwellings, and the audit names surviving examples on Brewer Street and in Ingestre Place, where St James Dwellings still stands.
At the same time, blocks of mansion flats went up along the new Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, among tall red brick buildings and theatres. A two-bed mansion flat can take longer to clean than a two-bed in a converted house, though the price is the same.
The 1960s added Westminster City Council’s own tower blocks. The best known is Kemp House on Berwick Street, built in 1960 to 1962 by Wates: a three-storey podium with shops on the market frontage, and a fourteen-storey tower of pinkish-yellow brick rising from its southern end. Ingestre Court, a tall freestanding block in Ingestre Place, is another. Berwick Street’s market below has been formally organised since 1892.
The other big landlord is Soho Housing, which local people set up in 1973 to stop existing houses being lost to redevelopment. It now owns and manages almost 800 properties in Soho and other parts of central London.
End of tenancy prices for Soho flats
| Property | Price |
|---|---|
| Studio | £174 |
| One bedroom | £225 |
| Two bedrooms | £261 |
| Three bedrooms | £357 |
| Four bedrooms | £443 |
| Five bedrooms or more | quoted from the room count |
| Your room in a shared flat, or part of a home | £30 per cleaner per hour |
The price is the same on the fourth floor without a lift as on the first. The oven is always extra: £31 for a single or a single wide oven, and £62 for a double or a 90cm range cooker. See our oven cleaning page for the full service.
Soho flats tend to have boards or tiles in the living space and carpet upstairs. Booked with the clean, carpets cost £29 a bedroom, £36 a living room, £47 a through lounge, £35 a flight of stairs, £20 a hallway and £8 a landing. Our carpet cleaning page explains the method. The calculator at the top of the page puts your exact price together in a minute.
What the clean covers
The cleaner works to our 57-point checklist. In a typical Soho flat the time goes like this:
- The kitchen, usually small and often in what was once a back room: cupboards inside and out, hob, extractor and filter degreased, tiles, sink, taps, fridge and freezer, and the floor under the units.
- The bathroom, where Thames Water’s hard water leaves scale on taps, the shower head, glass and tiles. Thames Water says all the water in its area is hard, because it passes through chalky limestone. Everything is descaled.
- Rooms: skirting, picture rails, panelled doors, frames, switches, radiators, inside wardrobes and built-in cupboards, window boards, sash runners and the inside of the glass.
- Floors vacuumed and washed, and the internal staircase if the flat has one.
Every cleaner is vetted at an interview in person, insured and trained on the checklist. We started in 2014 and work in London, Liverpool and Manchester. More than 300 letting agents use us, tenants have had £1.2m of deposits returned, and we are rated 4.7 on Google. If your agent or the clerk finds something within 48 hours, we come back and clean it again free of charge.
Rubbish times, parking and the congestion charge
Westminster runs timed collections across the West End. Bags must not go out more than 30 minutes before your street’s collection time, or the council can fine you. On moving day, look up your street’s slot on the council’s website first, and keep bags inside until then. Our cleaners leave the flat empty and clean, so plan your last rubbish run around that slot.
Soho is in Westminster’s parking zone G, which also covers Covent Garden, and pay-to-park bays there cost from £4.78 to £10.58 an hour depending on the vehicle’s emissions. It is also inside the London Congestion Charge zone. Any parking or congestion charge on your clean is passed on at exactly what we pay.
The same team covers the streets around Soho: Fitzrovia north of Oxford Street, the theatre-land flats of Covent Garden across Charing Cross Road, and the larger period flats of Mayfair west of Regent Street. We clean across London at the same prices. Call 0333 555 2076, 8am to 7pm, every day of the week.
Licensing and deposits in the West End ward
Soho is in Westminster’s West End ward, one of the 15 wards where selective licensing began on 24 November 2025. Landlords there need a licence for every privately rented home that is not already licensed as an HMO. Only Vincent Square, St James’s and Pimlico South were left out.
Separately, Westminster renewed its borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme, which started again on 31 August 2026 and runs until 30 August 2031. It covers homes where three or more people from two or more households share a kitchen or bathroom.
A licence is the landlord’s responsibility. What decides your deposit is the check-out report measured against the inventory from the day you moved in, allowing for fair wear and tear. In Westminster the money involved is large.
The ONS average rent for a one-bedroom home was £2,548 a month in August 2026, so a five-week deposit is close to £2,940. A kitchen left greasy or a bathroom left scaled is the usual reason some of that is held back.
Soho end of tenancy FAQs
My one-bed is above a restaurant on Dean Street. Will the kitchen grease cost extra?
No. It is £225 for a one-bed whatever state the kitchen is in. Only the oven, if you want it cleaned, is extra.
Do you clean flats in Kemp House or Ingestre Court?
Yes. Council, housing association and private flats are all priced the same way, by the number of bedrooms.
How much for a two-bed mansion flat on Charing Cross Road with a double oven?
£261 for the flat and £62 for the double oven. Add carpets at the add-on rates if the bedrooms are carpeted.
My landlord says the flat is licensed. Does that change the check-out?
No. Selective licensing in the West End ward sets standards for the landlord. Your deposit still depends on the inventory and the check-out report.
When should I put the last rubbish bags out?
No more than 30 minutes before your street’s collection time. Westminster’s website shows the slot for each street.