South Hampstead end of tenancy cleaning

The first thing a check-out clerk does in a South Hampstead flat is run a fingertip down the chrome heated towel rail, because on Finchley Road water that rail is where the deposit gets decided. I have watched it happen on Compayne Gardens more times than I can count. We are Monster Cleaning, we clean end of tenancy across South Hampstead and the mansion blocks off Fairhazel Gardens, and we charge £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against your inventory report, not against a hopeful glance round an empty flat. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the NW6 side of South Hampstead, the streets around South Hampstead Overground and Finchley Road, from Fairhazel and Compayne Gardens across to Priory Road and the Swiss Cottage edge. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Camden.

Why South Hampstead is NW6, and why that matters to your clean

People muddle it constantly. South Hampstead is NW6. Hampstead proper, the village with the Heath and the high street, is NW3, up the hill and a different world of housing. South Hampstead sits lower and to the west, wedged between Swiss Cottage, Belsize Park, West Hampstead and Kilburn, hung off Finchley Road and the South Hampstead Overground station. The council is the London Borough of Camden either way, so the licensing and the deposit law are the same. The flats are not.

That distinction is not pedantry. It changes the price and it changes the clean. A genuine Hampstead-village flat with an original chrome-and-brass bathroom is on our premium list. South Hampstead is not, so you pay our standard rates here, the same figures a tenant pays for end of tenancy cleaning in Kilburn or West Hampstead. What you get for that is a team that already knows this exact stock: the tall stucco-fronted villas off Fairhazel Gardens split into four or five flats, the red-brick Edwardian mansion blocks with their parquet halls and communal stairs, and the odd new-build infill near the O2 Centre.

South Hampstead is NW6, not the NW3 village, and that one fact sets your price.

The inventory clerks who walk these streets, from Fairhazel and Compayne Gardens across to Canfield Gardens, Greencroft Gardens and the mansion stretch on Aberdare Gardens, know the stock cold. They know where a rushed clean leaves traces on it. So do we.

The mansion-flat problem, and the villa conversion next door

Two archetypes dominate the patch, and they fail check-out in different ways.

The first is the Edwardian mansion block: purpose-built red-brick flats, three to six storeys, off Fairhazel Gardens, Canfield Gardens and the Aberdare Gardens end. Parquet or original-board hallways, casement windows, a communal staircase, and a bathroom tiled floor to ceiling on two or three walls. The catch with a mansion flat is the shared parts. The inventory almost always covers both faces of your own front door and the strip of landing or architrave it opens onto, because that door is the boundary between your flat and the block. Tenants clean the inside and forget the door gives onto a communal hall that the clerk will photograph. We do both sides, and the landing-side frame, on every mansion-block booking.

The second is the villa conversion: a big late-Victorian or Edwardian house, stucco or brick, carved into flats and maisonettes, the kind that lines Compayne Gardens and Greencroft Gardens. High ceilings. Deep cornice. Picture rails. A full-height bay on the front reception. Original timber windows with a bottom-rail bead that traps grey dust. These are the flats where the clerk carries a torch and runs the beam along a picture rail at head height, and the dust nobody saw on a normal scan lights up like a chalk line. A high reception ceiling is awkward to clean properly, which is exactly why it gets skipped, and exactly why it gets flagged.

Then a third slice, smaller but growing: the new-build and refurbished flats near the O2 Centre and the Finchley Road frontage. Integrated appliances, engineered floors, and sometimes a corporate or build-to-rent inventory stricter than any private landlord bothers with. Send us the operator’s checklist and we clean to it line by line.

What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it did not

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 sitting out a fixed term.

Here is the part that trips people. None of that touched the cleaning side of a move-out. Not one line. Your deposit is still capped and still has to be protected inside 30 days in one of the three statutory schemes. Your landlord still returns it minus reasonable, evidenced deductions. The benchmark your flat is judged against is still the check-in report. What the Act moved is timing, and in a high-churn corner like South Hampstead, full of one-year professional and academic lets near UCL and the Central School, timing is the thing that bites. Let tenants pick their own end date and the move-outs cluster harder at month-end.

The dull, practical takeaway pays for itself: book earlier than you used to, because the slot you want on the last Thursday of the month goes first.

Camden licensing, the bit landlords get wrong

Worth stating plainly, because the research most tenants find is out of date. Camden runs mandatory HMO licensing and a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme. It does not run selective licensing, and it never has borough-wide. The additional scheme was renewed and came back into force on 8 December 2025, running for five years to December 2030. Camden’s own guidance for agents and landlords is on the council site, though camden.gov.uk tends to block automated visits, so I will not link it here; search “Camden HMO licensing” and it is the first result.

Why does this reach your clean? A converted villa on Fairhazel or Greencroft Gardens split into enough separate households is an HMO, and the licence holder, your landlord, is held to a defined standard on kitchen extraction, bathroom ventilation and shared-area cleanliness at hand-back. When the licence sets the bar, the clerk inspects to it. The communal staircase, the shared landing and the extract fan all come into scope in a way they do not on a single self-contained flat.

Check-in inventory report

The document a clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos, often marked “new” or “as new” straight after a professional clean. It is the benchmark your check-out is measured against, which is why we clean to it and not to a vague idea of tidy.

End of tenancy clean

The hand-back clean built to pass that inventory and release the deposit, done with the flat empty, priced at £30 per hour per cleaner, with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it.

Deep clean

A deep clean for a home you are staying in. Lived-in, no inventory to satisfy, no formal standard to hit.

Regular domestic clean

A domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, weekly or fortnightly, from £22 an hour on a retainer.

The 57 things we check, room by room

Every South Hampstead booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist built over a decade of Camden check-outs and tuned to what these clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where the money usually goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak in a tank, the door glass is split so the brown film between the panes comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. That film between the glass is the single most-flagged oven fault on a Camden check-out. If the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it on its own. After the oven: hob and burners off and washed, the extractor hood degreased inside and out with the filter soaked or swapped, every cupboard front and interior including the awkward corner units in the older mansion kitchens, fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them, and the appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under the washing machine, dishwasher and fridge are done and put back. Then the washing machine: drum, the detergent drawer out and scrubbed, and the door seal, which the clerk opens first. Sink, taps and drainer descaled, tiles and grout scrubbed, floor pulled back where it lifts.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, the shower head, the screen and the tile joints first, with a careful hand where a mansion-flat bathroom has kept an older chrome finish that a brute-force descaler would strip. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving.

• Heated towel rail descaled rung by rung, front and the back face where it meets the wall bracket, which is the bit that gets missed
• Toilet done properly, inside, under the rim, the cistern, the hinges, and behind the pedestal where only the clerk looks
• Shower screen both sides, the tracks and the sealant bead
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, the overflow and the plughole
• Tile grout in the bath-to-wall corner and the shower-tray-to-wall corner, brushed with a soft toothbrush rather than a stiff scourer that leaves a chalk halo
• Extractor fan vent wiped and the sealant cleaned to a usable state; re-sealing is a handyman job, not a cleaning one

Reception rooms, bedrooms and the period detail

This is where the villa conversions earn their reputation. Cornice and picture rails soft-brushed clear and then hand-wiped on a damp microfibre, in every reception room, because that high dado of dust is the torch-lit flag. Ceiling roses and moulded architraves. The bottom-rail bead and the reveals of the original timber windows, worked with a fine brush, not just a swipe of a cloth. Skirting and radiators front, top and behind where access allows; the cast-iron ones take longer than a modern panel. Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard, and the built-in storage in these flats can be enormous, so it always gets opened. Original wood floors and parquet vacuumed along the grain, then mopped on a barely-damp pad with a pH-neutral cleaner. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Then switches, sockets, intercom panel, internal doors both sides, the stairs and banister where the flat has them, cobwebs out of the corners, and a final walk-through photographed room by room. That dated photo set is the evidence you keep.

Two jobs often need their own pass. Carpets in these reception rooms tend to be wool or wool-mix fitted to the centre of an original floor, and where a tenancy writes in professional hot-water extraction the carpet cleaning add-on covers it on the same visit. The inside-and-reveal window pass is included in the clean, but exterior glass on a first-floor bay is a separate job, which is what window cleaning is for.

What Finchley Road water does to a bathroom

South Hampstead sits in Thames Water’s supply, and the water here is hard, up around 300 mg/l as calcium carbonate, right on the line Thames Water itself draws between hard and very hard on its hard-water page. That single fact loses more deposits in these flats than anything except the oven. Three years of showering leaves a fur of scale along the lower rungs of a chrome towel rail and around every tap rim and shower head, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks it deliberately: a thumbnail down the tap, the screen edge read against the light, the shower head pulled in close. Scale set into the chrome is slow work, and on an older mansion-block fitting you cannot just reach for the strongest acid on the van.

Grout is the twin of it. Kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a deduction here more often than anything to do with carpets. We scrub it rather than wipe it, and where it is genuinely past saving after a long let we photograph the state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already grey in the check-in pictures. That photo has settled more arguments than any argument has.

That photo has settled more arguments than any argument has.

Specialist surfaces sit outside the scrub-and-go work. Original parquet in a mansion hall, a Victorian tiled path or fireplace surround, engineered board in a new-build: each takes its own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on handles.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

These are our standard South Hampstead rates. Flat fees, materials and travel inside NW6 included, no call-out charge. No premium loaded on for the postcode, whatever the estate agents’ window on Finchley Road might suggest about the neighbourhood.

Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long let with heavy wear, a pet household, or somewhere that has not had a deep clean in years costs more, and we say so on the phone, not after. Hourly bookings, where you only need a part-clean or a top-up, run at £30 per cleaner per hour. The oven stands alone from £77, and the range cooker in a bigger family flat is £114.

Now run the sum the deposit makes you run. A two-bed on Fairhazel Gardens at £243, set against a deposit north of £2,500, is not really a decision. Most tenants only do that maths after they have cleaned it themselves, failed the check-out and lost the first round, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if your agent flags a cleanliness issue inside 48 hours we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us in that window and nobody has moved in. Our 97% first-time pass rate across these jobs is why agents keep using us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That last number is really the whole job.

A Compayne Gardens job from March

“First-floor two-bed in a villa conversion on Compayne Gardens, three years, and we’d given it a proper going-over ourselves the weekend before. Felt fine. Then the clerk knelt by the bath, ran a finger down the chrome towel rail and wrote ‘heavy scale, both bathrooms’ before she’d looked at anything else. We panicked and rang Monster on the Wednesday. Two cleaners, full day on the Thursday: both towel rails and every chrome fitting descaled on a separate pass, the picture rails and cornice in the front bay hand-wiped, and the cooker hood filter pulled out to soak. She re-walked it Friday and signed the cleaning off in full. We got £2,900 of a £3,000 deposit back, the £100 was a chip on a worktop, nothing to do with the clean.”
Hannah and Tom, Compayne Gardens NW6, March 2026

That is the pattern up here in the conversions: a longish let, chrome furred by hard water, a clerk who checks the towel rail first. What turned it was not only the scrubbing but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice. Most DIY check-outs have nothing to show when the agent pushes back.

Questions we get asked

How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in South Hampstead?

It starts at £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 flat or split-level conversion. Those are our standard rates and they include materials and travel inside NW6. South Hampstead is not on our premium list, so you pay the same as a tenant in Kilburn or West Hampstead, not the higher Hampstead-village rate. The price is a flat fee, not an hourly total, and it does not change with how long the job takes.

Is South Hampstead in NW6 or NW3?

NW6. South Hampstead sits below and west of Hampstead village, between Swiss Cottage, West Hampstead and Kilburn, around South Hampstead Overground station and Finchley Road. Hampstead proper is NW3. Both are in the London Borough of Camden, so the deposit law and the council licensing are identical, but the postcode and the housing are different, and South Hampstead is charged at our standard rates.

Do you clean the Edwardian mansion blocks off Fairhazel and Canfield Gardens?

Yes, regularly. A mansion flat is a particular kind of clean: parquet or original-board halls, casement windows, floor-to-ceiling tiled bathrooms, and a communal staircase. The inventory almost always covers both sides of your front door and the landing or architrave it opens onto, because that door is the boundary with the block. We clean both faces of the door and the landing-side frame on every mansion-block booking.

What about the villa conversions on Compayne and Greencroft Gardens?

Those are the high-ceiling flats with deep cornice, picture rails, a full-height reception bay and original timber windows. The clerk checks the cornice and picture-rail dust under a torch, and the bottom bead of the windows, so we hand-wipe every picture rail and cornice and brush out every window reveal as standard. A four-bed conversion here can take a three-cleaner team a full day.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change anything for South Hampstead tenants?

From 1 May 2026, Section 21 is abolished and every assured shorthold tenancy converts to a periodic tenancy, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any time. The cleaning obligations at the end of a tenancy do not change at all. The real effect around here is more frequent and less predictable move-outs, which makes booking your clean early more important, not less.

How long does a two-bed end of tenancy clean take in South Hampstead?

A two-bed conversion or mansion flat, lived in two to three years by a couple, takes a two-cleaner team five to seven hours. A larger first-floor flat with a full-height bay and deep original cornice can run to eight, in which case we send three cleaners. The flat fee is the same whichever way it goes.

Do you bring all your own materials?

Yes, every booking. Two or three cleaners arrive with all materials, microfibres, descalers, soft grout brushes, a steam machine, vacuums, a stepladder for the cornice and picture rails, and pure-water tools for the inside of the windows. You do not need to provide anything. We work around the empty flat.

Do I need professional carpet cleaning as well?

Sometimes it is written into the tenancy. Camden flats, including around South Hampstead, quite often carry a clause requiring professional hot-water extraction with a receipt at check-out, and if that clause is in your agreement and you skip it the deduction is close to automatic. The standard clean always includes a thorough vacuum with edges and corners done; a full shampoo is an add-on at £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed.

What about ovens and cooker hoods?

A single oven is £77 as an add-on, a double is £110, and a 90cm range cooker is £114. The cooker hood filter and the canopy interior are included in every oven add-on at no extra charge. On a bigger family kitchen with a range and a separate combi-oven we run both at the right tier.

Do you handle HMO flats let under Camden licensing?

Yes. The bigger converted houses on Fairhazel, Greencroft and Canfield Gardens are often let under Camden’s additional HMO licensing scheme, which was renewed in December 2025 and runs to 2030. Camden does not run selective licensing. Under an HMO licence the hand-back standard is higher because your landlord has obligations to the council on kitchen extraction, ventilation and shared-area cleanliness, so we clean the communal staircase, the landing and the extract system as part of the job where they are in scope.

What if the clerk flags something after we have left?

Ring us inside 48 hours of the clean. Under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee we send a cleaner back at no charge to fix the flagged item. The window runs from when we finish, not from the inventory walk-through, so getting the walk-through booked promptly after the clean matters.

Will you move heavy furniture?

Not on an end of tenancy clean. The flat should be empty or near-empty when we arrive. We will shift a fridge or a freestanding cooker, a small bookcase, or a sofa to vacuum under, but we do not move pianos, fitted wardrobes, or anything that needs more than two people to lift.

What if my deposit is already in dispute?

The three statutory schemes, the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits and the Deposit Protection Service, all run free adjudication. If your landlord or agent is proposing a cleaning deduction you disagree with, you raise it with whichever scheme holds the money. We give you an itemised invoice and the 57-point checklist sign-off as evidence, and Shelter’s guidance walks through the steps.

How do I pay, and when?

Bank transfer or card, after the clerk has signed off. We do not take payment up front and we do not charge a deposit to hold the booking. The flat fee on the quote is the figure you pay, with nothing added afterwards without your say-so.

Booking it, and the month-end squeeze

Camden is one of the worst boroughs we work for month-end clustering, and South Hampstead’s short professional and student lets make it worse. Almost every check-out here lands on the last two or three days of the month, the slots go, and ringing on the 29th for the 31st often leaves you stuck. Book early for those windows. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected]. Price in about three minutes: give us the postcode, the property size, the check-out date and any known problem areas, and mention anything the check-in report marked “new” or “as new”.
2. We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow 7 to 10 days for an end-of-month slot, 3 to 5 days mid-month.
3. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared, so nothing blocks access.
4. Photo proof at the end. Every room, before and after, with an itemised invoice on company paper. That is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct.
5. Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.

One honest word on parking. The controlled parking zone runs across most of the patch Monday to Friday and the residents’ bays are tight, especially around Greencroft Gardens and Goldhurst Terrace at school pick-up. Tell us the arrangement when you book, a visitor permit, a meter or a bay, and how we get in: concierge, key safe or an agent drop-off. Monster Cleaning Ltd has been trading since 2014, company number 9919639, and if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.