The two Stratfords, one licensed and the other not
Stratford is split down the middle by a council boundary most renters never hear about until it matters. Newham’s selective licensing scheme runs borough-wide, except for two wards: Royal Victoria, and Stratford Olympic Park. So the E20 blocks built on the old London 2012 site, East Village included, sit in the one corner of Stratford where a landlord does not need a selective licence. Cross into the E15 streets around Maryland and the Theatre Royal and the rule flips: those properties do need one.
It sounds like a technicality. It changes who you are dealing with at move-out. A licensed E15 landlord has a council file, a fit-and-proper assessment, and a set of conditions about the condition of the property. The E20 owner two streets away, inside the Olympic Park ward, has none of that, and tends to lean harder on the inventory report and the deposit scheme instead. Either way the clean has to pass. The route a dispute takes is just different.
Why the E20 blocks turn over so fast
East Village was the athletes’ village for the 2012 Games. It housed 17,000 competitors, then reopened as a residential quarter with more than 2,800 homes and roughly 6,000 people living there now. A lot of those flats are let, and a lot of those tenancies are short. People take a year near the station, then a job moves or a Westfield contract ends and they go. The result is a postcode where flats change hands at a pace the older parts of Newham never match.
Fast turnover shapes how the cleaning works. Agents managing the E20 blocks book the next tenant before the last one has the keys back, so the gap between your check-out and the new check-in is sometimes a single day. There is no slack for a re-clean if the first attempt misses. We hear the same thing from tenants near Chobham Academy and along Liberty Bridge Road every spring: the move date slipped, the inspection did not, and they need the flat cleared and cleaned inside a tight window.
People live here precisely because they can leave quickly, and they do.
The flats themselves help and hinder in equal measure. They are recent builds, so there is no decades-deep grime, no ancient ovens welded shut with carbon. But the surfaces are unforgiving. Matt kitchen units mark, the resin or engineered floors show every smear, and the integrated appliances behind those flush handleless doors hide the dirt until a clerk opens them. A surface clean reads as clean right up to the moment someone checks the extractor filter.
Transport is the other reason these tenancies are so mobile. Stratford station carries the Elizabeth line, the Jubilee, the Central, the DLR, the Overground and c2c, and Stratford International runs high-speed trains that reach St Pancras in six minutes. People live here precisely because they can leave quickly, and they do.
The park, the mall and the East Bank next door
What sits around these flats is what keeps them let, and it keeps changing. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park wraps the E20 blocks on three sides, with the London Stadium where West Ham play, the London Aquatics Centre, the ArcelorMittal Orbit with its slide, and the Lee Valley VeloPark all a short walk from the front doors. Westfield Stratford City, one of the largest malls in Europe, sits on the other side of the station, and Stratford Cross is still rising around it as a multi-billion-pound mix of offices and homes. People rent here for the access, then move on when the reason they came does.
The newest pull is the East Bank, the culture and education quarter built into the north of the park. V&A East Museum and the V&A East Storehouse are open, Sadler’s Wells East opened its 550-seat theatre in early 2025, UCL East now teaches around 4,000 students, and London College of Fashion brought its campus over in 2023. BBC Music Studios, the future home of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, follows in 2027. Each opening brings a fresh wave of staff, students and short lets into the surrounding E20 flats, and students in particular move on a tight academic calendar that bunches check-outs into the same few summer weeks.
That matters for cleaning because the demand is seasonal as well as fast. June through September the E20 blocks empty and refill almost in lockstep with the term dates at UCL East and the fashion campus, and a clerk who has six check-outs in a week has no patience for a flat that misses the standard. We keep weekend and early-morning slots open across those months precisely because the Stratford diary clusters that way. A student handover in East Village and a family move out of an older E15 house are different jobs on different clocks, and we plan each one for what it is.
None of this changes the clean itself. It changes the timing pressure around it, and timing pressure is where deposits quietly leak.
The licence line and what it means at move-out
Newham has run property licensing longer and harder than almost any council in England. The current selective licensing designation came into force on 1 June 2023 and runs until 31 May 2028, the borough’s third consecutive five-year term. It covers private rented homes across the borough, with the two named exceptions: Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park. The earlier scheme had carved out the whole E20 postcode; this one draws the line by ward instead, which is why the boundary now sits where it does. You can read the council’s selective licensing designation notice for the exact wording and the full ward list.
Why does a tenant care about a landlord’s licence? Because a selective licence ties the landlord to conditions on how the home is managed and handed over, and it gives you a council route if things go wrong. In the licensed E15 wards that backstop exists. In the E20 Olympic Park ward it does not, so the deposit scheme and the inventory become the whole of the argument. The clean carries more weight there, not less, because there is no licence file sitting behind the dispute.
Newham was the first council in the country to bring in borough-wide licensing back in 2013, and it has renewed the scheme twice since. The third term is the one running now. For landlords that means a real cost and a real obligation: the licence fee, the property standards, and an inspection regime the council actively enforces, with civil penalties for letting an unlicensed home in a covered ward. Tenants rarely see that paperwork, but they feel its effect at move-out, because a landlord carrying licence conditions tends to manage the handover more carefully than one who is not.
A few terms come up again and again once a tenancy ends in Stratford. Worth knowing what they actually mean.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme requiring most private landlords to hold a licence per let property. In Newham it costs £750 for up to five years, with a reduction to £650 for accredited landlords whose home has an EPC of A+, A, B or C. It applies across the borough bar the Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park wards.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken when you moved in, recording the condition of every room. The check-out clean is judged against this, not against a generic idea of clean.
- Deposit protection
- By law your deposit sits in an approved scheme and must be returned within ten days of both sides agreeing the figure. The gov.uk deposit rules set out the timing.
- Fair wear and tear
- Normal ageing from ordinary living, which a landlord cannot charge you for. A scuffed skirting is wear. A filthy oven is not, and that distinction is where most cleaning deductions are won or lost.
One more point worth stating plainly. A clause demanding you pay for professional cleaning is not enforceable. Under the Tenant Fees Act those blanket terms are banned, and Shelter’s guidance on cleaning deductions spells it out. You must return the flat to its check-in standard, no more. Most Stratford tenants still book a professional clean, because doing it yourself to that standard after a move is harder than it sounds, and a receipt settles arguments fast.
What a clerk checks in a new-build E20 flat
Inventory clerks working the East Village and Stratford Cross blocks go straight for the spots a hurried clean skips. The integrated appliances first. They pull the oven door, check the glass between the panes, lift the extractor filter, and slide the fridge salad drawers out. On a handleless kitchen they run a finger along the top edge of the units where grease drifts and nobody wipes.
The hard floors are the next trap. Engineered timber and polished resin look spotless under flat daylight and show every streak the moment low evening sun comes through those big windows, which most of these flats have. Mopping is not enough; the floor has to be cleaned and then buffed dry or it dries cloudy. Clerks know this and tilt their head to catch the light.
Then the wet rooms. Shower screens cloud with soap and the hard London water leaves scale on the glass and the chrome. Newham sits in a hard-water belt, so the limescale builds quickly even in a flat that is only a few years old. We treat the screen, the taps and the tile grout properly rather than wiping the surface, because a clerk who sees a hazy screen marks the whole bathroom down.
The fitted storage is where the E20 flats catch people out most often. East Village and the Stratford Cross blocks lean on built-in wardrobes and full-height cupboards to make the most of compact floor plans, and the tops, the runners and the inside corners collect dust that a quick wipe of the doors never reaches. Clerks open every door and run a hand along the top shelf. We clean the insides, the shelving and the tracks, because that shelf is a logged surface on the inventory and it is checked.
Balconies are the quiet one. A lot of these flats have a small private balcony or a juliet, and the inventory records its condition, yet it is the first thing a moving tenant forgets. Leaves, grime on the glass balustrade, a ring where a plant pot sat. It is a five-minute job that turns into a deduction when it is skipped, so it goes on the list.
White goods finish the kitchen check. Where a flat comes with an integrated washer-dryer or dishwasher, the clerk looks at the rubber door seal and the detergent drawer, both of which grow mould and scale that a tenant rarely thinks about. We wipe the seals, clear the drawers and run the surfaces, so the appliance reads as cared-for rather than just used.
Our cleaners carry a 57-point agent-approved checklist into every Stratford job, and it maps onto exactly what the clerk is holding. Skirting boards, the insides of wardrobes and cupboards, window interiors, switch plates, extractor vents, the lot. We built the list with letting agents, so it is the same list the inspection runs on. That is a large part of why the first-time pass rate sits at 97%.
A surface clean reads as clean right up to the moment someone checks the extractor filter.
If the clerk does challenge anything, we come back. The 48-hour re-clean guarantee means a free return visit within three days if the agent or inventory clerk flags the work, and on the tight E20 turnaround windows that promise is worth more than the clean itself. You are not left arguing with a deduction while the next tenant moves in.
Older Stratford, the E15 terraces and the Carpenters blocks
Walk west from the station and Stratford changes character within a few hundred metres. The E15 streets around Maryland, Leytonstone Road and Carpenters Road are older, mostly terraces and converted houses, plus the council blocks of the Carpenters Estate sitting on its 23-acre site right next to the platforms. This is the licensed half of Stratford, and the cleaning challenges are the opposite of the E20 flats.
The terraces have history baked in. Older ovens with years of carbon, painted-over radiators, sash and casement windows with paint-clogged runners, and kitchens where the units predate the current tenancy by a couple of decades. Limescale collects on old taps. Grout has gone grey in bathrooms that were last refitted in the 2000s. A clean here is more about lifting accumulated grime than catching smears in the evening light.
These are also the homes most likely to have been split into separate lets. A two-storey terrace off Leytonstone Road might hold an upstairs flat and a downstairs flat with a shared hallway, each with its own check-out, and the communal parts get argued over because nobody is quite sure who cleans them. We treat the let space the inventory covers and tell you plainly where the line falls, so you are not paying to clean a hallway that was never logged against your tenancy. On the older stock the kitchen and the bathroom carry the deductions; the bedrooms almost never do.
Heritage runs through this side of Stratford in ways the E20 blocks cannot match. The Theatre Royal Stratford East has stood on Gerry Raffles Square since the 1880s, and the streets around it are the original town centre that the Olympic build grew out of rather than replaced. A tenant moving out of a flat near the old market is dealing with a building that has seen a century of wear, not a handover snag from a block finished five years ago.
The Carpenters Estate is its own case. Built in the 1970s with around 710 homes, it is now part of a £1.4bn regeneration that will bring roughly 2,022 new homes and a fresh station entrance off Gibbins Road, with the James Riley Point tower being refurbished. While that plays out, plenty of the older flats are still let and still turning over, and an ex-council flat has its own quirks: communal-stair access that makes carrying kit awkward, older electric storage heaters that gather dust, and kitchens fitted to a 1970s footprint.
We clean both sides of Stratford with the same checklist but a different rhythm. The E15 jobs usually need more time on the appliances and the bathrooms; the E20 jobs need more care on floors and matt surfaces. If you are moving between the two, or out to West Ham or Leyton next door, the standard is identical even though the work is not. You can read about our coverage across the wider borough on the Newham end of tenancy hub, or check our pages for end of tenancy cleaning in West Ham and Leyton if your move crosses the boundary.
What the clean costs and what is in it
We price by the size of the property, not by the hour, so the figure you are quoted is the figure you pay and the team stays until the checklist is done. An end of tenancy clean is £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 East Village lets are studios and one-beds, so the lower end of that range covers a large share of E20 moves. The price holds whether the team is in for three hours or most of the day.
The end of tenancy clean covers the whole flat top to bottom. Kitchen units inside and out, the oven and hob, sinks and taps descaled, all bathrooms sanitised, tiles and grout scrubbed, skirting boards, switch plates, interior glass, wardrobes and cupboards wiped through, and floors cleaned to suit the surface. We bring every machine and detergent on site, so all the property needs is electricity and running hot water and no belongings left behind.
If you would rather hand us a specific list than book the full package, we also work by the hour at £30 per cleaner. That suits a part-clean, say a tenant who has done the bedrooms themselves and only wants the kitchen and bathrooms brought up to inspection standard. For most full move-out cleans the fixed size-based price works out better, because nobody is watching a clock.
Two things make the money back end of this worth taking seriously. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, several of them managing the Stratford blocks, so the inspecting clerk often already knows our work. And we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. A clean that passes first time is the cheapest part of any move.
The add-ons most Stratford moves need
The end of tenancy clean handles the flat itself. Two jobs sit outside it and come up on nearly every Stratford booking, so it is worth knowing the numbers up front.
Carpets are the first. Plenty of E20 flats are hard-floored, but the bedrooms are often carpeted and the older E15 lets are carpeted throughout. We use hot water extraction, which lifts ground-in dirt rather than just freshening the pile, and it is what an inventory clerk expects to see against a carpet logged as clean at check-in. Carpet cleaning runs at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat done together. If a stain has been there since you moved in, photograph the check-in report; that is fair wear and not your bill. Our carpet cleaning service covers the detail.
Ovens are the other. It is the single most common deduction in any move-out, and on the integrated ovens in the new E20 kitchens it needs the appliance taken apart properly. We dismantle the door, take out the glass and the removable parts, and clean each piece separately to shift the burnt-on carbon. A single oven is £77, a double £110, and a range cooker £114. The older E15 terraces often have a heavier build-up that makes this the job most worth booking. See the oven cleaning service for what the strip-down includes.
Upholstery is the third one worth a mention, though it comes up less often. Where a flat is let furnished, and a fair few of the E20 corporate lets are, the sofa and any fabric chairs are on the inventory and get checked for marks. We clean upholstery by the same hot water extraction method as the carpets, lifting the dirt out of the fibres rather than dampening the surface. If your tenancy came with a sofa logged as clean, it needs to go back the same way.
Both add-ons fold into the same visit as the main clean, so the team does everything in one appointment and the flat is inspection-ready when they leave. Booking them together also tends to work out cheaper than calling a separate firm back for the oven a day later, and it keeps the whole handover on one receipt, which is exactly what you want to hand a clerk or an agent who queries the standard.
Booking a clean around a Stratford move
Booking is meant to be quick, because by the time most people call they are already short of days. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your postcode and the size of the property, and we give you a fixed quote on the spot. No survey visit, no vague hourly estimate that creeps up on the day.
We work seven days a week, which matters in the E20 blocks where a Saturday or Sunday slot is often the only gap between your check-out and the new tenant’s check-in. Tell us the inspection time and we schedule the clean to finish before the clerk arrives. For the older E15 jobs we usually suggest a little more time, since the appliances and bathrooms take longer in a property that has been lived in for years.
Access is worth flagging when you book, because it varies wildly across Stratford. The newer blocks usually have a concierge or a fob entry and a goods lift, which we will need booking if it exists, since several East Village buildings ask for the service lift to be reserved for moves and cleans. The older terraces and the Carpenters blocks are the opposite: street parking, sometimes a long carry up a communal stair, no lift at all. None of it stops the job, but telling us up front means the team arrives with the right plan and the right kit rather than working it out on the doorstep.
It also helps to line the clean up after the removals, not before. There is no sense cleaning a flat and then dragging a sofa back across the floor for the van, so we usually slot in once the property is empty. If your move and your clean are on the same day, give us the order of events and we will fit around the lift booking and the van.
On the day, leave the flat empty of your belongings and make sure the power and hot water are still on. The deposit return itself runs through whichever scheme your landlord used, and the money should come back within ten days of both sides agreeing the figure, with the rules for landlords set out in the gov.uk guidance on deposit protection schemes. Tenancy law itself is shifting too, with the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 changing how tenancies end, though the cleaning standard at the end of one has not moved.
Our office is at 255 Upper Richmond Road West, SW14 8QS, and we have cleaned across Stratford since 2014. We know the difference between an East Village handover and a Carpenters Estate one, and we price and plan for the one you actually have.
Questions Stratford tenants and landlords ask
Do you cover both E20 and E15 Stratford?
Yes. We clean across all of Stratford, from the new East Village and Stratford Cross flats in E20 to the older terraces and the Carpenters Estate blocks in E15, and out into the neighbouring wards. The checklist is the same everywhere; we just adjust the time to the property.
Does my Stratford landlord need a selective licence?
It depends which ward the property is in. Newham’s selective licensing covers the borough except Royal Victoria and Stratford Olympic Park, so an E20 flat in the Olympic Park ward is exempt while an E15 home in the Stratford ward needs a licence. The designation runs from 1 June 2023 to 31 May 2028.
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Stratford?
It is priced by property 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. The price is fixed, so the team stays until the 57-point checklist is finished.
What happens if the flat fails the inspection?
We come back free within 48 hours if the inventory clerk or agent challenges the clean. On the tight East Village turnaround windows that guarantee matters, because you are not left covering a deduction while the next tenant moves in.
Can my landlord force me to pay for professional cleaning?
No. A blanket clause requiring professional cleaning is banned under the Tenant Fees Act. You only have to return the flat to the standard recorded at check-in. Most tenants still book a clean, because matching that standard yourself after a move is hard and a receipt ends any argument.
Do you bring your own equipment and products?
Yes, the team brings every machine and detergent. All the property needs is working electricity, running hot water, and no belongings left in the rooms during the appointment.
Is the oven included in the end of tenancy clean?
Yes, the oven and hob are part of the standard clean. For heavily built-up ovens, common in the older E15 kitchens, we offer a full strip-down: £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker.
How do you handle the hard floors in the new E20 flats?
Engineered timber and resin floors streak and dry cloudy if they are only mopped, so we clean and then buff them dry. Clerks tilt the light to catch smears on these floors, and we clean them to hold up under that.
Do you clean carpets as well?
Yes, by hot water extraction, which lifts ground-in dirt rather than just freshening the surface. It is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed, and it folds into the same visit as the main clean.
How quickly can you fit in a Stratford clean?
We work seven days a week and can often take a weekend slot, which is usually the only gap in the fast E20 turnover. Tell us your inspection time and we schedule the clean to finish before the clerk arrives.
What does the hard-water treatment cover?
Newham sits in a hard-water area, so scale builds on taps, shower screens and tile grout even in newer flats. We descale the taps and fittings and clear the screen and grout, rather than wiping the surface, because a hazy screen marks the whole bathroom down.
Do you work with letting agents in Stratford?
Yes. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, several of them managing Stratford blocks, so the inspecting clerk often already knows our standard before they walk in.
Will a clean get my full deposit back?
A passing clean removes the cleaning deduction, which is the most common reason money is held. We have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning, though other deductions like damage or rent arrears sit outside the clean.
How do I get a quote?
Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your postcode and property size, and we give you a fixed quote straight away. No survey visit and no hourly estimate that grows on the day.