The 300-yard gap that defines South Ealing
South Ealing station and Northfields station sit barely 300 yards apart, one of the closest pairs of over-ground stops on the whole tube network. That short hop is most of what South Ealing is. It is a thin strip of W5 hung off South Ealing Road, wedged between Ealing Broadway up the hill and Brentford down by the river, quieter than either and easy to drive past without noticing. We clean here a lot, and the geography decides the job.
The station opened on 1 May 1883 as a District Railway stop on the line out to Hounslow, and it has carried the Piccadilly line since January 1933. The brick building you see now, with its small Holden-style tower, replaced the original in the 1980s. It sits in zone 3 on the Heathrow branch, between Northfields and Acton Town, with no step-free access, which matters more than you would think when you are carrying a sofa down to a van.
This page is about one job and one job only. Getting a South Ealing property through its final inspection so the deposit comes back whole. The area has its own quirks, the long road through the middle, the cemetery on it, the old hamlet at Little Ealing, the hard west London water, and a licensing line it sits on the quiet side of. The rest explains how we handle them and where a W5 clerk actually looks.
South Ealing Road and the cemetery on it
South Ealing Road is the spine of the place. It runs north to south from Ealing Common down towards Little Ealing and the South Circular, with the station roughly halfway along and a run of shopkeepers, cafes and the odd letting agent strung either side. When tenants here say they live in South Ealing, this road is usually what they mean, and most of the flats we clean are within a few minutes of it.
Partway down sits South Ealing Cemetery, which tells you how long this corner has been settled. It opened in 1861, run by the Ealing and Old Brentford Burial Board, on a plot bought a year earlier to serve both Ealing and Brentford before they split into separate districts. It has grown to about 21 acres over the years, and it holds the Commonwealth war graves of 184 service personnel along with a Belgian soldier of the First World War. The two chapels on the site are old enough to sit on Historic England’s at-risk register. It is closed to new burials now.
None of that cleans a flat, but it does explain the housing. A road with a Victorian burial ground halfway down it is a road with Victorian and Edwardian houses around it, and that is the bulk of what we work in here. Long brick terraces, bay fronts, the side-return kitchen pushed out the back, plus a scatter of 1930s semis on the streets that filled in later. Most are let to families or working couples who have stayed a few years, so the wear is honest and the kitchens have done real cooking.
Little Ealing, Pope’s Lane and the Gunnersbury edge
Walk south down South Ealing Road and you reach Little Ealing, the old hamlet that was here long before the railway. A cluster of fine eighteenth-century houses survives there, threaded through with later Victorian streets, and the council treats the corner as a genuine heritage pocket alongside the Northfields conservation work next door. It is a different kind of let from the terraces nearer the station, often larger and older, and a clerk inspecting one of the bigger houses expects a finish to match.
Pope’s Lane runs west off this end towards Gunnersbury Park, and the park is the green edge of the area. Gunnersbury is Grade II listed, one of the more important historic parks in the country, and it came through a £20m-plus restoration finished in 2018, shared by the two councils either side of it, Ealing and Hounslow. Beyond it the ground drops towards the M4 and the river. I mention all this because it places the homes. The streets down by Little Ealing and Pope’s Lane are older and leafier; the flats up by the station turn over faster and clean up quicker.
Lammas Park is the other open space worth knowing, about eight minutes’ walk from the station and roughly 25 acres, its name left over from the medieval lammas land where tenants once grazed cattle after harvest. Walpole Park is a little further up towards the Broadway. A clerk does not care about the view. They do care about the damp that creeps into the older houses near the low ground, and that they will mark.
What a W5 deposit is really worth
Under the Tenant Fees Act, the deposit on most tenancies is capped at five weeks rent, and on a typical South Ealing let that is a real sum. For a couple in a two-bed flat off the road it runs to four figures, and for a family in one of the Little Ealing houses it runs higher. It is your money. The landlord only holds it, and the law says it has to sit in one of three government-backed schemes within thirty days of you paying it, where neither side can touch it until you both agree how it divides.
That last part is the catch, because agreement is exactly what a cleaning deduction destroys. The pattern is the same one we see right across W5. The tenant cleans as best they can on the last night, the clerk does the check-out the next morning, and a few days later an email lands proposing a deduction for cleaning, sometimes carpets on top. The figure is rarely outrageous, which is the whole trick of it. It is pitched low enough that arguing feels like more bother than the money is worth, so most people just sign it off. That quiet shrug is where tenants lose the most. We have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, much of it money people had already given up on.
The figure is rarely outrageous, which is the whole trick of it.
The licensing line South Ealing sits on the quiet side of
Here is where South Ealing differs from a lot of the borough, and it is worth understanding before the keys change hands. Ealing runs a selective licensing scheme that forces ordinary private landlords in named wards to hold a licence, and South Ealing’s ward is not in it. A mile or two north and east, in Hanger Hill or Acton Central, a single-family let needs that licence. Down here it does not.
The detail is this. Ealing’s selective licensing covers a fixed list of wards, the bulk of them added on 3 January 2023, including Perivale, Hanger Hill, Acton Central, South Acton and the two Greenford wards. South Ealing falls under Walpole and Northfield, and neither sits on that list. So an ordinary private let here, a flat or a family house rented to one household, does not need a selective licence at all. You can check any address against the council’s private rented property licensing page.
One rule does still reach South Ealing, though. The whole borough sits under an additional HMO licensing scheme that started on 1 April 2022, and that one bites everywhere, Walpole and Northfield included. If a house is let room by room to three or more unrelated people, it needs an HMO licence whatever the ward. Plenty of the bigger Victorian houses near Little Ealing have been split that way, so it is not a rare case here. The single-family flats near the station are the ones that escape licensing altogether.
Why does any of this touch your deposit? Where there is no selective licence, as with most single lets here, the check-in inventory carries even more weight, because it is the main thing standing between you and a disputed deduction. Either way the lesson is the same. Get the clean right and the paperwork works in your favour.
The deposit rules in plain English
The rules behind a cleaning dispute are not complicated, but they decide who wins one, so they are worth a read before you hand the keys over. A handful of terms come up again and again.
- Deposit protection
- Your deposit has to sit in a government-approved scheme within thirty days of you paying it. The three schemes are the Deposit Protection Service, mydeposits and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. Gov.uk sets out the deposit protection rules and the deadlines.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken at the start of your tenancy, recording the condition and cleanliness of every room. The check-out is judged against it, which makes it the single most important document in any argument, and more so on a South Ealing let that carries no selective licence.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual wear a landlord cannot charge you for, like a faded carpet or a scuffed wall. Dirt is not wear and tear, and cleaning can always be deducted, which is why it is the most common deduction of the lot. Citizens Advice explains how to get your deposit back.
- HMO licence
- The council permit a landlord needs to let a house room by room to three or more unrelated people. It applies right across South Ealing under the borough-wide scheme, even though selective licensing does not. Shelter sets out your wider rights on tenancy deposits.
The bigger change on the horizon is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which got Royal Assent on 27 October 2025. It abolishes fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies and reworks how tenancies end, but it does not change the basic deal on deposits. You still pay one, it still has to be protected, and cleaning is still the deduction a landlord reaches for first. If anything, with the notice rules tightening, a clean final inspection matters more, not less.
Our figures, and what the guarantee covers
We would rather show you the numbers than describe ourselves in adjectives. Across our end of tenancy work we run a 97% first-time pass rate, which means the large majority of cleans are signed off by the agent or the clerk without a single thing sent back. The work follows a 57-point checklist built around what west London agents actually inspect, and it is the same list whether we are in a studio near the station or a five-bed off Pope’s Lane. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, which is part of why we know how a South Ealing check-out is scored before we walk through the door.
The guarantee is the bit that counts when something does go wrong, because now and then it does. If the inventory clerk or the agent challenges any part of our work, we come back and put it right under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee, at no extra cost to you. There is one condition we cannot get round. The property has to have electricity, running hot water and no belongings left in it when we clean, because the team cannot do the job properly without power, hot water or empty rooms. Strip the place first, then call us.
The 57-point clean, room by room
An end of tenancy clean is not a normal clean done harder. It is a different job. A normal clean keeps a lived-in home tidy. This one returns an empty property to the condition recorded when you moved in, top to bottom. Here is roughly how it runs in a South Ealing terrace.
The kitchen takes the longest, every single time, and in a W5 house that has cooked proper food for years it takes longer still. The oven comes apart, racks and door glass out, and gets degreased inside until the enamel shows again. We do the hob, the extractor and its filter, the splashback, and the tops and insides of every cupboard and drawer. The fridge and freezer are cleaned and defrosted if they are staying. Behind and beside the appliances, where the grease gathers, gets done too, because that is the first place a clerk looks. The bathroom is next, with the scale taken off the taps, the shower screen and the tiles, the toilet descaled and the grout scrubbed. The water out this way is hard and leaves a dull chalky film, usually the first thing an inspection picks up in a South Ealing bathroom.
Then the rest of it. Walls and skirting wiped down, switches and sockets, doors and frames, the tops of the doors. Windows cleaned inside, sills and frames included. Carpets hoovered thoroughly and spot-treated, hard floors washed. Light fittings, radiators, the dust on top of the picture rails in the older houses, the insides of the fitted wardrobes. The bits people forget are the bits that get marked. The checklist exists so nothing is missed, and the team lead works through it before the job is signed off. We do not rush the kitchen to free up time for a tidy lounge.
The older South Ealing houses throw up jobs the newer flats never do, and they catch people out. Sash windows with painted-over cords that need easing and wiping. Picture rails and deep coving holding dust since the last tenant left. Original tiled hearths and encaustic hall floors that go grey without a proper clean. The awkward gap beside a side-return kitchen, and the airing cupboard nobody empties. We have done enough of these houses to know where the dirt hides, so we plan the time for it instead of finding it at the end. A modern flat near the station is quicker on most of that, though an agent there often expects the finish close to new.
The bits people forget are the bits that get marked.
Where a W5 inventory clerk marks you down
After enough South Ealing check-outs you learn where the marks land. It is the same short list nearly every time, and almost none of it is the rooms a tenant scrubs on the last night.
- Oven glass and the runners inside the door. Clerks open the oven and hold the glass up to the light.
- The extractor filter, which most tenants have never taken down, let alone washed.
- Scale on the shower screen, the taps and around the plugholes, courtesy of the hard chalk water.
- Skirting and the carpet edges where a sofa or a bed stood for three years.
- Window sills, the runners and the inside of the frames, worst of all in the older terraces near the road.
There is one more thing clerks check that catches tenants out. Mould and condensation marks around the windows and in the corners of bathrooms, which build up in the older South Ealing houses and the streets down towards the low ground by Gunnersbury, because the damp sits there and the houses were never built for the way we heat and seal homes now. A clean lifts the surface marks, and a clerk can tell a wiped frame from one that has just been left alone. We treat those spots as part of the standard job, not an extra, because in this housing stock they are close to a given.
None of that is hard to clean if you know it is coming and you have the time and the right products. The trouble is that on the last night of a move you have none of those things. You are tired, the van is loaded, and the cream cleaner ran out two boxes ago. That is the gap we fill. We turn up with the kit, we know the list the clerk is working from, and we start on the oven and the bathroom because that is where the deposit is decided.
Getting a van to your door around South Ealing
South Ealing is easy enough to reach and occasionally a pain to park, and South Ealing Road is the reason for both. The road carries the 65, E2 and E3 buses, and at the school run and the evening peak the stretch near the station and the cemetery clogs up, so we build that into our timings rather than promise an arrival we cannot make. The South Circular and the run towards the M4 at Gunnersbury are the other slow points when they back up.
Once you are off the main road, access is mostly straightforward. The Victorian terraces on the side streets have the usual controlled-parking-zone bays, rarely a problem outside the busy hours, though you may need a visitor permit for the day. The flats near the station and the bigger houses down by Pope’s Lane sometimes mean a permit, a shared driveway or stairs with no lift, so tell us the access when you book. South Ealing tube, the cemetery gates and Gunnersbury Park are all easy landmarks if you are talking us in.
South Ealing sits in the middle of a run of areas we already cover, which helps if your move is a local one. Northfields is the next stop along the Piccadilly line, barely 300 yards south, Brentford is down past the M4 towards the river, and Gunnersbury sits just west across the park. The parent for all of them is our Ealing end of tenancy hub. If you are moving from one to another, the same team and the same van can clean the old place and, if you want it, sort the new one.
The point of all this is timing. A clerk books a check-out slot and expects the property clean when they arrive. We plan the route so the clean is finished and checked before that slot.
What it costs
We price by the property, not by the hour, and there is a reason for that. An hourly rate rewards a cleaner for working slowly. A fixed price for the property means the team stays until the checklist is finished, however long that takes, and you know the cost before anyone turns up.
Our end of tenancy prices start at £156 for a studio and £207 for a one-bed flat. A two-bed is £243, a three-bed £339, and a four-bed £425. What moves the figure is the size of the place, the number of bathrooms, and the state it is in when we arrive, because a home that has been kept reasonably is quicker than one where the oven has not been touched in two years. If you would rather have a cleaner by the hour for a smaller job, that is £30 per cleaner, though for a full move-out the fixed price almost always works out better.
Carpets that need hot-water extraction are priced on top, because that is a separate machine and a separate job. We charge £36 a bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 to do the carpets through a whole two-bed flat. Oven cleaning, if you want it taken further than the end of tenancy clean covers, is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. There are no surprise charges. The number we quote when you book is the number you pay.
Give us the postcode and the bedroom count and we will quote you over the phone in a couple of minutes. The quote is free and there is no pressure to book on the spot.
Booking, and the 48-hour re-clean
Booking is meant to be quick. Moving is stressful enough without it. Call us, tell us the address and the size, and we will give you a price and a slot. We work seven days a week, which matters when your tenancy ends on a Sunday and the check-out is first thing Monday. Most people book us for the day after the van leaves.
On the day, the team arrives with everything needed, the machines, the products and the cloths, so you do not have to leave anything behind. The property has to be empty, with the electricity and the running hot water on. We work through the 57-point checklist room by room, and the team lead checks it before they leave. If the inventory clerk later challenges anything, we return under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and fix it free, as long as the property is still empty and we can get in. The guarantee is rarely called on, but it is why the agents along South Ealing Road are happy to put our name forward.
If you want to talk it through first, just ring. We would rather answer your questions before you book than have you guess. Reach us on 0333 555 2076, email [email protected], or use our contact page.
Carpets, ovens and the other jobs we bring
The end of tenancy clean covers the property, but a few jobs are big enough to be their own service, and a South Ealing move-out often needs one or two on top. We bring them on the same visit. That means one team and one bill rather than chasing separate contractors.
The most common add-on is carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction, because a hoover does not lift three years of ground-in dirt and a clerk can tell at a glance. If the oven is in a real state, our oven cleaning takes it apart and degreases every piece rather than wiping the front. We do upholstery cleaning for sofas and mattresses staying with the property, and exterior window cleaning by water-fed pole where the landlord wants the outside of the glass done, which comes up a lot on the bay-fronted terraces. Worn vinyl and tired tiles are common in these older houses, so we also handle hard floor cleaning. For a furnished place that has been let go, a full deep clean can sit alongside the end of tenancy work.
Plenty of our South Ealing customers are moving locally, so it is worth saying we also handle removals and ongoing domestic cleaning once you are in the new place. There is a full list of the areas we cover on our end of tenancy hub, and the same checklist and the same guarantee apply wherever you are.
South Ealing end of tenancy FAQs
Will an end of tenancy clean get my full deposit back in South Ealing?
It gives you the best chance, because cleaning is the most common reason deposits get cut and a proper clean removes that reason. We run a 97% first-time pass rate and back the work with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so if a clerk challenges anything we put it right free. Damage and genuine wear we cannot control, but the cleaning we can.
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in W5?
It depends on the size of the property, the number of bathrooms and the state it is in, because we price by the property rather than by the hour. A studio starts at £156 and a one-bed at £207, with a two-bed at £243, a three-bed at £339 and a four-bed at £425. Tell us the postcode and bedroom count on 0333 555 2076 for a free fixed quote.
Does my South Ealing rental need a selective or HMO licence?
An ordinary single-family let in South Ealing does not need a selective licence, because the Walpole and Northfield wards are not in Ealing’s selective licensing scheme, unlike Perivale or Hanger Hill nearby. The borough-wide additional HMO scheme still applies, though, so a house shared by three or more unrelated people needs an HMO licence. You can check your address on the council’s licensing pages.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or the letting agent flags any part of our work, we return within the guarantee period and re-clean the affected areas at no charge. The only conditions are that the property is still empty and we can get access. It means a deduction for our cleaning should never land on you.
Do you cover all of South Ealing and the rest of W5?
Yes, we clean across the whole of South Ealing, from the Victorian and Edwardian terraces along South Ealing Road to the older houses by Little Ealing and the newer flats near the station. We also cover neighbouring Northfields, Brentford, Gunnersbury and the wider Ealing area if your move is a local one.
Does the property need to be empty when you clean?
Yes. We need the flat or house emptied of all belongings, with the electricity and running hot water still on, before we clean. The team cannot reach behind furniture or clean a kitchen properly with things in the way, and they need power and hot water to finish the job to the standard an inspection expects.
Is carpet cleaning included or is it extra?
It is a separate job, priced on top, because it needs a hot-water extraction machine rather than a hoover. We charge £36 a bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 for the carpets through a whole two-bed flat. We will tell you honestly whether yours need it, and if they do we do it on the same visit. See our carpet cleaning service.
Can you clean around a same-day move-out and check-out?
Often, yes, though it is tight and a clear run is better. The property has to be empty before we start, so when the removal van and the check-out fall on the same day the timing needs care. Book the clean for the day after the move if you possibly can, and we will fit the slot around your check-out.
Why is the water so hard on South Ealing taps and screens?
West London sits on chalk, so the mains water is hard and leaves a chalky film on taps, shower screens and tiles. It is the single most common thing an inventory clerk picks up in a W5 bathroom. Taking that scale off properly is part of our standard end of tenancy clean, not an add-on you pay extra for.
How quickly can you come out in South Ealing?
Usually within a day or two, and often sooner, because we work seven days a week and a lot of South Ealing moves are booked at short notice. Ring us on 0333 555 2076 with your date and we will tell you straight away what we can do.
Do you bring your own products and machines?
Yes. The team turns up with all the products, cloths and machines, including the hot-water extraction kit if you have booked carpets. You do not need to leave anything behind or buy supplies in. All we ask is that the power and the hot water are still on when we arrive.
Do you clean the bigger period houses near Little Ealing?
Yes. The houses down towards Little Ealing and Pope’s Lane are often larger and older, with sash windows, deep coving and original floors that need careful work at the end of a tenancy. The finish an agent expects there tends to be high, so we plan the time around the windows, the frames and the original detailing.
What makes an end of tenancy clean different from a regular clean?
A regular clean keeps a lived-in home tidy week to week. An end of tenancy clean returns an empty property to its check-in condition, top to bottom, including the oven inside, the extractor filter and the spots behind the appliances a normal clean never touches. It is judged against the inventory, which is why it follows our 57-point checklist.