The clean an ex-council St Paul’s Cray house needs
End of tenancy cleaning in St Paul’s Cray is a deep, single-visit clean of the whole property, priced by the number of bedrooms rather than the hour, and finished to a letting agent’s inventory standard, with a free re-clean inside 48 hours if the clerk flags anything. That is the short version. The rest of this page is the detail, because a house on the post-war estate here is its own kind of job, and both the price and the timing follow from what these houses are.
St Paul’s Cray sits in the BR5 postcodes, in the south-east of the London Borough of Bromley, in the St Paul’s Cray ward, which returns three councillors to the council. It is one of the Crays, strung along the river with St Mary Cray and Foots Cray. Most of what you see was built in one go after the Second World War, as an out-county estate for London, and that single fact shapes the lets, the streets and the move-outs. The houses are roomy and practical, the gardens are real, and a clerk going through one at check-out has plenty to run a finger along.
A 1950s out-county estate, not an old village
St Paul’s Cray is two places really. There is the old riverside hamlet around the church, which is genuinely ancient, and there is the estate, which is not. The London County Council bought up the farmland and woods here after the war and built a whole township on it, to rehouse Londoners moved out of the crowded inner boroughs, a good many of them East Enders. By 1949 the estate was already going up across the fields; through the 1950s it filled out into housing for around ten thousand people, with its own shopping parade, schools, churches, a library and an industrial estate attached. It was meant to be a self-contained town, not a suburb bolted onto an old one.
That is why the street pattern out here reads the way it does. Long curving roads of near-identical houses, greens and verges between them, the names taken off the planners’ lists rather than off old farms. Mickleham Road, where the St Paul’s Cray Library still stands, runs through the heart of it. Cotmandene Crescent, with its parade and its post office, was one of the little local centres the LCC dropped into the estate so people did not have to trek to Orpington for a pint of milk. A bit later, in the 1960s, the council added more around Okemore Gardens, including the two tower blocks, Horton and Alkham Towers, that still stand over that end.
It was meant to be a self-contained town, not a suburb bolted onto an old one.
The old St Paul’s Cray is the other half, and it is worth knowing because it explains the name. The church on Main Road, by the river, is St Paulinus, an eleventh-century building that may sit on a Saxon foundation, with a rare dedication to a seventh-century Bishop of Rochester. The place is named after the saint, not the apostle: St Paul’s Cray is just a worn-down St Paulinus Cray, and the Domesday Book of 1086 already calls it Paulinus Cray. The church was made redundant in 1978 and a congregation uses it now, but it is older than the better-known one down at St Mary Cray, and it marks the original riverside settlement the estate grew out from.
None of that is decoration on the page. The mix matters to the work. A clean here might be a 1950s estate house off Mickleham Road or a flat in one of the later blocks, and the two hand back differently. That is the thread the rest of this runs along.
Why an ex-council house cleans differently from a private semi
The estate houses were built plainly and well. No bay windows full of leaded lights, no picture rails gathering dust up high, which sounds like less to clean and in one way is. The catch is how they get used. These are family houses with proper back gardens, often let to households with children or pets, and the back door is open half the year. So the floors carry grit, the kitchens see real daily cooking, and the wear lands low down where a clerk looks closely: skirting, door frames, the edges of the kitchen floor, the bottom of the oven.
Then there is the water, which is the thing tenants underrate most round here. The Cray valley sits on chalk, and the supply is hard, up around 267 milligrams of calcium per litre on the Thames Water figures. Limescale builds on taps, around plugholes and on shower screens far quicker than people are used to, and a bathroom that looks clean to you can read as neglected to a clerk who runs a cloth over the tap and finds it furred. We descale all of that as a matter of course, because it is one of the two or three things that most reliably costs an estate tenant part of a deposit.
The later flats, in the blocks around Okemore Gardens and the smaller maisonettes, are a different shape of job again. Smaller rooms, but communal stairs and a shared front door that the clean does not cover, and kitchens and bathrooms packed into a tighter footprint where the scale and the grease concentrate. A maisonette can take nearly as long as a house once you account for the fitted kitchen and the bathroom, even though the floor area is smaller. We price by the number of bedrooms either way, so the quote reflects the rooms rather than guessing at hours.
One genuine upside out here, mind. Parking is rarely the fight it is in inner London. Most estate houses have a kerb you can pull the van onto or a quiet road right outside, and there is no permit war to lose before the team has carried a mop in. The trade-off is distance: if a job gets overlooked it is a longer trip back to fix, so we would far rather get the whole house right in the one visit.
What the clean covers, room by room
Everything in the property, top to bottom, worked through against a 57-point agent-approved checklist room by room. The list is the one the local letting agents recognise, and that is the point of it: it lines up with what their inventory clerks check, so nothing gets left because nobody thought to look there.
In the kitchen that means inside and out of every cupboard and drawer, the splashbacks, the extractor and its filter, the sink and taps descaled, and the appliances cleaned properly. The oven gets the full treatment if you add it: door split down, racks and removable parts taken out and degreased, then the cavity done by hand. Worktops, tiles and grout, then the skirting and the floor last, so the team is not treading dirt back over what it has just finished.
Bathrooms are scrubbed and sanitised, tiles and grout included, glass and screens left clear, and the hard-water marks taken off the taps and the shower fittings. Bedrooms and living rooms are dusted down, cobwebs cleared from the corners, sills and internal glass wiped, mirrors polished, fitted cupboards cleaned inside and out, and skirting, doors and frames gone over. Carpets are hoovered throughout. A hot-water extraction clean is a separate add-on for when the inventory wants the pile properly lifted rather than just vacuumed.
The extras a busy family house tends to need sit outside that core list and are priced on their own. An oven that has not been touched between tenancies wants a full strip-down. Carpets that have had children and a garden through them all year usually want extraction, not a hoover. The outside of the upstairs windows is a water-fed-pole job we add on, since the inside is in the standard clean but the outside is the bit a tenant cannot safely reach. We tell you on the quote which of these your house actually needs, rather than bolting them all on by default.
Three practical conditions decide whether the visit finishes in one go. The property needs electricity and running hot water on the day. The fridge and freezer want switching off and defrosting before we arrive, because a freezer full of ice cannot be cleaned and refilling the slot wastes a trip. And the place has to be clear of your belongings, since we cannot clean behind boxes and a clerk marks down whatever is left in a cupboard. Sort those three and the team works straight through.
What it costs in St Paul’s Cray
The price follows the number of bedrooms, in full and not by the hour. A studio is £156, a one-bed flat £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339, and a four-bed £425. Most St Paul’s Cray lets are two and three-bed estate houses, so they land in the middle of that ladder, and a larger house or a maisonette with an awkward layout is quoted on what it actually has once we know the room and bathroom count.
Because we charge by the property and not the clock, the team stays until the checklist is done. An hourly job pulls the other way, and you can feel it when a cleaner is watching the time instead of the grout. If you would rather book cleaners by the hour for a part-job, a single room or a quick once-over, that is £30 per cleaner an hour. For a deposit-grade end of tenancy clean, the fixed by-the-property quote is the one that makes sense.
Add-ons are priced separately and fold into the same visit. Carpet cleaning by hot-water extraction is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed’s worth. Oven cleaning is £77 for a single, £110 for a double, and £114 for a range cooker. We give you one combined figure up front, so there is no add-up surprise once the team has packed the van.
One thing worth saying plainly, because people ask. We do not drop the price to win the job and then cut corners to make the sums work. The figure you are quoted is the full price for the full checklist, and it buys a team that stays until a clerk would pass the house. A cheap quote on a three-bed usually means a fixed block of hours, and a fixed block of hours on a family house with a hard-water bathroom and a well-used kitchen means the team is gone before the fiddly parts are done. That is how tenants end up paying twice, once for the clean and again in deductions.
If your tenancy agreement names a particular standard, send us the wording when you book. Some agents round here ask for a professional clean with a receipt; a few attach their own clerk’s checklist. We work to either. The receipt we issue is the document a deposit scheme’s adjudicator will want to see if the landlord ever disputes the cleaning, so keep it with your check-out paperwork.
The estate, the industry belt and what clerks check
St Paul’s Cray has a working edge most of its leafier neighbours do not, and it affects the lets. Along Cray Avenue and Sevenoaks Way, the A224 that runs the valley, sits a long industrial belt, the Sevenoaks Way Industrial Estate, Crayfields Business Park, Crayfield Industrial Park and the units around Ravensquay, the descendant of the light-electrical and manufacturing works that grew here when the estate was built. A lot of local renting is tied to that: people who work the estates and the warehouses, shorter tenancies, and agents used to turning a house around quickly between them. The move-outs come thick and fast, and the clerks who check them have seen every shortcut.
Most lettings here run through agents covering the wider Orpington and Cray valley patch rather than a single high-street cluster, and the same names handle St Mary Cray and Petts Wood up the line. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and the ones working this area behave a particular way. A fair share of the housing is ex-council and privately let now, turnover is quicker than in the owner-occupier suburbs, and an independent clerk usually does both the check-in and the check-out, keeping the original inventory and the photographs and laying the two side by side at the end. A vague “cleaned throughout” line does not satisfy that. A clean against the checklist, with a receipt, does.
The check-out itself is line by line. Clerks on these houses tend to start in the kitchen, where the oven and the cupboards hold most of the deductions, then work the bathroom for hard-water scale and the bedrooms for dust and for the state of the fitted cupboards. The kitchen floor edges and the skirting get a look, because that is where a garden and a busy household leave their mark. We clean in the order a clerk inspects, which is how we hold a 97% first-time pass rate. On the rare miss, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we are back to put it right at no charge, before the report is finalised, if the clerk or agent challenges the work.
If you want to know where the money actually goes on these lets, it is a short and predictable list. The oven, every time. Hard-water scale on the bathroom taps and the shower screen, because the water is so hard off the chalk. Grease and grime in a well-used kitchen, on the splashbacks and the extractor. The floor edges and skirting, where grit from the garden grinds in. Clear those and the report comes back clean; leave them and a clerk has the time to write each one up.
That guarantee is not a throwaway line. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and the way you do that is by being willing to come back. The agents keep using us because the re-clean almost never gets called. The tenants keep their money because, when it is, we turn up.
Your deposit, the law and Bromley’s HMO rules
Your deposit is protected, by law, in one of three government-backed schemes within 30 days of the landlord receiving it. Cleaning is the single most common reason money gets held back at the end of a tenancy, which is the whole reason a proper clean pays for itself. If there is a dispute, the scheme’s free adjudicator decides it on the evidence: the inventory, the check-out report and your cleaning receipt. So keeping that paperwork matters.
- Deposit protection scheme
- A government-approved holder of your deposit. Landlords must protect it in one of the three schemes and tell you which within 30 days; the rules and the scheme list are set out in the government’s tenancy deposit protection guidance.
- Check-in inventory
- The signed record of the property’s condition and cleanliness at the start of the tenancy. The check-out is judged against it, so the standard you hand back to is the standard you took on, not some abstract idea of spotless.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual ageing a landlord cannot charge you for. Dirt, grease and limescale are not wear and tear; they are cleaning, and they come out of your deposit if you leave them.
- Mandatory HMO licence
- A council permission needed to let a house in multiple occupation. In Bromley only the mandatory scheme applies, explained below.
On licensing, Bromley keeps it narrow. The council runs the mandatory HMO scheme and nothing wider, with no borough-wide additional or selective licensing, so an ordinary family let in St Paul’s Cray needs no licence at all. A property let to five or more people forming two or more households who share a kitchen, bathroom or toilet is a mandatory HMO and does need one, as does a smaller share with a live-in landlord and four or more tenants. You can read the council’s own position on houses in multiple occupation for landlords; the mandatory licence lasts five years and the holder must pass a fit-and-proper-person test.
There is a planning point that does reach St Paul’s Cray, and it is worth knowing before anyone thinks of carving a house into rooms. Bromley has made an Article 4 direction that removes the usual permitted-development right to turn a family house into a small HMO without planning permission. An immediate direction covers the Biggin Hill and Darwin wards from 1 September 2021; a separate non-immediate direction covers every other ward in the borough, St Paul’s Cray included, and has been in force since 1 September 2022. So splitting a house here into a small shared house now needs a planning application that, before that date, it would not have. For a tenant on a normal let none of this applies, but it is part of why the estate stays family-sized.
The wider rules are shifting too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 has begun changing how tenancies end and how deposits and conditions are handled, building on the deposit-protection duty that has sat in the Housing Act 2004 since 2007. None of it changes the basic deal at move-out: hand the house back clean, against the inventory, and the deposit comes home.
Add-ons that earn their place
Three extras come up again and again on these houses, and booking them with the end of tenancy clean is cheaper and simpler than chasing separate trades.
Oven cleaning is the one clerks check first. We take the door and the racks apart and degrease the lot, so the oven comes back to the colour it started. Single £77, double £110, range cooker £114. On an estate kitchen that has cooked for a family for a few years, it is the add-on that earns its money most reliably.
Carpet cleaning by hot-water extraction lifts the ground-in dirt a hoover leaves behind, which matters where children and a back garden come through the house all year. It is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed’s worth, done at the same visit so the carpets are drying by the time you lock up. Exterior window cleaning by water-fed pole reaches the upstairs glass without a ladder up against the wall, the bit tenants cannot easily do themselves and clerks still expect to see clear.
Booking, access and the St Mary Cray station run
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 any day of the week, weekends included, tell us the property and roughly its size, and we give you a fixed quote and a slot. Email [email protected] if that is easier and we come back the same day. We cover this whole corner of the borough, so if your move is in Orpington or St Mary Cray we clean there too, and the wider hub for the borough is our Bromley end of tenancy cleaning page.
A word on access, because timing is most of what goes wrong on a move-out. St Paul’s Cray is served by St Mary Cray station, with Southeastern trains up to London in well under the hour, which is why a lot of people live here and why moving days bunch around the train times. Buses help where the station does not, with the 51, 273, B14, R1, R4 and R11 threading the estate and out to Orpington and Sidcup. Most houses have a kerb or a quiet road to park the van on, so access is rarely the problem. Pinning the clean to the right day is.
Get the timing right and the rest is easy. We would rather come in after the removals van has gone and the house is properly empty, because an end of tenancy clean and a half-packed house do not mix, and a clerk wants to see clear floors and empty cupboards. If your check-out appointment is fixed, tell us the date and we slot the clean a clear day before it where we can, so there is room for the 48-hour re-clean to land inside the window if anything ever needs a second look. Book early in a busy moving month; the Friday and weekend slots go first.
If you want the house turned around for new tenants rather than checked out, our deep cleaning service is the same standard without the inventory framing. It is also the one to ask for if you are moving within the area rather than out of it. Tell us which one you need on the call.
That is the whole process. One visit, one fixed price, one checklist, and a re-clean in reserve if a clerk ever disagrees.
Frequently asked questions
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in St Paul’s Cray?
It is priced by the size of the property, not by the hour: £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. Most St Paul’s Cray lets are two and three-bed estate houses, so they sit in the middle of that range, and a larger house or an awkward maisonette is quoted on its actual layout.
Why does an ex-council house here need as much cleaning as a private one?
Because of how these family houses get used. They have proper back gardens and busy kitchens, so grit and grease land low down on skirting, door frames and floor edges, exactly where a clerk looks. The hard chalk water also builds limescale on taps and shower screens quickly, so the bathroom needs more work than it looks.
Do you guarantee I will pass the check-out inspection?
We hold a 97% first-time pass rate, and if the inventory clerk or agent challenges the work we come back within 48 hours and put it right at no charge. Keeping your cleaning receipt and the check-in inventory helps if there is ever a deposit dispute.
What does the end of tenancy clean include?
The whole property against a 57-point agent-approved checklist: kitchen cupboards inside and out, appliances, bathrooms descaled and sanitised, all rooms dusted down, cobwebs cleared, sills and internal glass cleaned, skirting and doors wiped, and carpets hoovered throughout. Hot-water carpet extraction and oven cleaning are add-ons.
Is oven cleaning included or extra?
It is a separate add-on, booked at the same visit. A single oven is £77, a double £110, and a range cooker £114. We take the door and racks apart and degrease everything, which is the part clerks check first.
Can you clean the carpets at the same time?
Yes. Carpet cleaning by hot-water extraction is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed’s worth, done during the same visit so the pile is drying by the time you hand the keys back.
Why does the hard water matter for my deposit?
The Cray valley sits on chalk, so the water is hard, around 267 milligrams a litre, and scale forms quickly on taps, plugholes and shower screens. A bathroom that looks fine can read as neglected when a clerk runs a cloth over the taps, so we descale those properly as part of the clean.
Do you clean flats and maisonettes in the tower blocks too?
Yes. The flats and maisonettes around Okemore Gardens and the blocks clean differently from the estate houses, with smaller rooms but tighter kitchens and bathrooms where scale and grease concentrate. We price by the number of bedrooms, and the clean covers your own flat, not the communal stairs or shared front door.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
No, as long as we can get in and the property is empty of your belongings. Many people hand us a key or a code and meet the removals elsewhere. Just arrange access before the day, since popping back for a forgotten key is harder once you have moved.
What do you need from me before the visit?
Electricity and running hot water on the day, the fridge and freezer switched off and defrosted, and the property cleared of your things. A freezer full of ice cannot be cleaned, and we cannot clean behind boxes, so those three conditions let the team work straight through.
How long does it take to clean a St Paul’s Cray house?
It depends on the size and condition, and because we price by the property the team stays until the checklist is done rather than clocking off at an hour. A typical three-bed estate house is most of a working day; we give you a realistic window when we quote.
Does my landlord need an HMO licence in St Paul’s Cray?
Only if the property is let to five or more people forming two or more households who share a kitchen, bathroom or toilet, which is a mandatory HMO, or four or more with a live-in landlord. Bromley runs the mandatory scheme only, with no additional or selective licensing, so an ordinary family let needs no licence.
Are there special planning rules for HMOs in St Paul’s Cray?
Yes. Bromley has a non-immediate Article 4 direction covering every ward except Biggin Hill and Darwin, in force since 1 September 2022, and St Paul’s Cray is one of them. So turning a family house into a small HMO here needs planning permission. For ordinary tenants on a single let this does not apply.
Will a clean help me get my full deposit back?
It removes the most common reason deposits get docked. Your deposit is protected in a government scheme, and at check-out the clerk compares the property to the check-in inventory; hand it back clean against that record and there is nothing to deduct for cleaning.
Do you cover Orpington, St Mary Cray and Petts Wood too?
Yes, we clean right across this corner of Bromley, including Orpington and St Mary Cray along the valley and Petts Wood up the railway line. A team covering one of those is close to the others, so we can usually fit a St Paul’s Cray job around them.
How do I book?
Call 0333 555 2076 any day of the week, weekends included, or email [email protected]. Tell us the property and its rough size and we will give you a fixed quote and a slot, usually the same day.