End of tenancy cleaning in Surrey Docks, booked in minutes

The first thing the inventory clerk does in a Greenland Dock flat is stand the torch flat against the balcony glass, then crouch to do the same along the engineered floor, comparing both with the move-in photos before they have taken their coat off. That is the moment your deposit is decided in Surrey Docks, because almost nothing here is forgiving period stock: it is dockside flats with pale wide-plank floors and full-height glazing that hold every mark. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, a London firm since 2014, and we run move-out cleans across SE16 to a 57-point agent-approved checklist at £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SE16 dockland: Greenland Dock, Surrey Quays, the South Dock Marina blocks, Marine Wharf, Plough Way and the streets around Canada Water and Russia Dock Woodland. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Southwark.

Why a dockside deposit slips when the flat looks clean

The deposit fight on the Rotherhithe peninsula is hardly ever about a dirty flat. It is about modern surfaces measured against a check-in photo. When the old Surrey Commercial Docks were rebuilt from the 1980s as Surrey Quays, the London Docklands Development Corporation put up more than 5,500 new homes around the water, and the 2000s and 2010s then layered glass-and-balcony apartment blocks on top of that. So the home a tenant hands back here is overwhelmingly newish: handleless gloss kitchens, engineered or laminate wide-plank floors, shower screens in place of curtains, and a great deal of glazing facing the dock. Every one of those takes a mark and keeps it.

Inventory clerks who work SE16 know exactly this. They arrive with the check-in report on a tablet and hold the move-in photo of the kitchen splashback or the living-room window right beside the real thing, torch raked low across the surface. A grease haze on a white handleless door, a cloudy bloom on the balcony glass, a grey scuff line where a sofa was dragged along a skirting, a tide ring inside the shower screen left by very hard water: any of those, photographed clean at check-in, becomes a line on the deduction schedule. None of them are visible in ordinary daylight. That is precisely why tenants who scrubbed for a weekend still lose money.

There is a legal backdrop worth a line. A deposit on an assured shorthold tenancy must sit in a government-backed scheme such as the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, and if you and the landlord fall out, the case goes to that scheme’s free adjudicator, who decides on evidence. The single strongest piece of evidence is the clerk’s paired check-in and check-out photos. A professional move-out clean exists to wipe out the visible difference between those two frames so there is nothing for an adjudicator to award against you. The same evidence principle is set out in tenant guidance on gov.uk.

The marina, the glass, and what the torch finds

Surrey Docks has a feature most London areas do not: working water on the doorstep. South Dock reopened in 1994 as London’s largest marina, with more than 200 berths, and Greenland Dock next to it is the biggest surviving dock on the peninsula, with a watersports centre on it. Hundreds of flats look straight onto that water through full-height windows and off private balconies, which is lovely to live in and a nuisance to hand back, because glass that faces a dock catches salt-damp, gull mess and a fine bloom that the tenant stops noticing within a week of moving in. The clerk does not stop noticing. They check the glass edge-on against the light, both faces where they can reach, and a hazy pane reads as a missed clean.

Glass that faces a dock catches a bloom the tenant stops noticing within a week. The clerk does not stop noticing.

Then there is the water itself. SE16 runs on Thames Water’s supply, which is very hard, around 253 mg/l of calcium carbonate in the Rotherhithe readings against a wider London average near 293 to 302. On the modern bathrooms and kitchens that dominate these blocks that hardness is the quiet deposit-killer. It leaves a grey-white film on glass shower screens, a chalky crust on chrome mixers and rainfall heads, and a dull ring on tap bases that a sponge does nothing to. Thames Water publishes the hardness figure for the postcode on thameswater.co.uk. We descale every screen, head and mixer back to clear as standard, because scale that built up over a tenancy is read on the report as neglect, and it is one of the most reliable deductions on the peninsula.

One tenant near Marine Wharf put it to us better than we would. “I’d wiped the balcony glass twice with the spray from under the sink and it still had this film on it I couldn’t see straight on, only when the evening sun hit it. Same with the shower screen. Your two cleaners cleared both in an afternoon and the clerk matched her photo to mine and said nothing.” That is the job in one paragraph: the marks you cannot photograph yourself are the ones the clerk will.

We moved out of a one-bed off Plough Way after fourteen months, lived in on my own and never properly deep-cleaned because I worked late. The check-in report had the pale engineered floor down as unmarked, and by the end it had a scuff line along the hall and a dull patch by the balcony door. Two cleaners came for about four and a half hours, brought the floor back evenly with the right product instead of a wet mop, did the glass and the rest, and the full deposit came back with no argument. I had braced myself to lose a few hundred.
Priya N., former tenant, Plough Way SE16, March 2026

What 1 May 2026 did, and the Southwark licence most landlords miss

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to end. Here is the part people get wrong: the cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The check-in benchmark still applies, the deposit maths is exactly what it was, and you still hand the flat back to the standard in the report. What changed is timing. On a high-churn peninsula full of one-year corporate lets, rolling notice means move-outs land less predictably and the month-end pile-up is not going to ease, so the practical takeaway is dull but it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to.

There is a Southwark twist most generic cleaning pages get wrong, and it matters if you are a landlord. The council runs a selective licensing designation that names the Surrey Docks ward directly, in force from 1 November 2023 to 31 October 2028. Under that scheme a privately rented home let to a single household or to two unrelated sharers needs a selective licence, and the application fee is £945. Separately, Southwark operates a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme for shared houses of three or four tenants from two or more households, running from 1 March 2022 to 28 February 2027, with a fee of £1,365.10. Both schemes carry property-condition standards, and the council inspects against them.

Selective licence

For an ordinary private let in the named ward, a single household or two sharers. Names the Surrey Docks ward, runs to 31 October 2028, fee £945.

Additional HMO licence

For a shared house of three or four people from more than one household. Borough-wide across Southwark, runs to 28 February 2027, fee £1,365.10.

Why it sits on a cleaning page

A licensed flat that fails on cleanliness or condition at a council check is a far bigger problem than a held deposit, and a documented turnover clean between tenancies is part of how careful landlords here stay compliant.

Southwark’s own licensing pages can block automated readers, so confirm your block against the ward map before you relist rather than relying on a summary. If you are not sure which side of a boundary you sit on, ring us with the postcode and we will tell you what we see on the ground.

Surrey Docks block by block: the stock changes round the water

We clean the whole Surrey Docks and Surrey Quays footprint inside SE16. The runs below are the ones we work most, and what the clerks flag splits cleanly by the age of the block, which is worth knowing before you book.

• Greenland Dock, Greenland Quay and Brunswick Quay
• Finland Street, Norway Gate, Onega Gate and Rope Street
• The blocks fronting South Dock Marina off Sweden Gate
• Plough Way and Yeoman Street toward Marine Wharf West and East
• Maple Quays and Ontario Point near Canada Water
• Redriff Road and Surrey Quays Road by the shopping centre
• Deal Porter Way and the streets toward Canada Water station
• The townhouse rows backing onto Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill

On the LDDC-era dockside townhouses and the late-1980s blocks round the marina, the recurring write-ups are extractor filters thick with old cooking grease, the tiling behind the hob gone tacky, an internal stair carpet with a worn grey traffic line, and limescale crust on bathroom fittings where decades of very hard water have built up. On the 2000s-to-2020s apartment stock at Marine Wharf, Plough Way, Maple Quays and Ontario Point it is different and harder to pass: pale engineered or laminate floors with scuff lines and dragged-furniture marks, balcony and full-height glazing with a haze the tenant cannot see, white handleless units with a greasy bloom at the cooking end, shower screens carrying a hard-water tide line, and skirtings scuffed where a sofa or bed was shifted. Across both kinds, the single most common reason a Surrey Docks deposit gets touched is the floor and the glass, not anything dirty in the obvious sense, because those are what the check-in camera caught cleanest. We brief our cleaners on the block they are walking into so the clean targets what the clerk on that street will actually photograph.

A landlord we turn flats round for near Greenland Quay said the thing that keeps him coming back is not the scrubbing. “It’s that you photograph the floor and the glass before and after. When a tenant queries a deduction, I send the set, and the conversation is over. I don’t get that from a one-off Gumtree cleaner.” Fair enough. The evidence pack is half of what you pay for.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over years of local check-outs and tuned to what these SE16 clerks actually flag. The full list comes with the job. Here is the shape of it.

Kitchen

This is where most of the money is won or lost, because the handleless gloss units show grease and the clerks know to look. We degrease the oven inside, the door glass, the racks and the grill pan back to bare metal, pull the extractor filter and degrease it, and clean the hood and the tiling behind the hob where the tacky film builds. Cupboard doors and handles, worktops, the splashback, the sink and the mixer are all done, with the chrome descaled because of the very hard water. We pull the fridge-freezer and washer-dryer out where they move safely, clean behind and underneath, defrost the freezer if needed, and wipe the casings and seals. Inside every cupboard and drawer, emptied and wiped.

Bathrooms and shower rooms

The shower screen is descaled to clear glass on both faces, including the seal and the channel where the tide line forms. The rainfall head, the mixer, the taps and any chrome are taken back to shine. We clean and sanitise the toilet fully, including the base and behind, the basin and its pedestal or vanity unit, the bath, all tiling and grout, the extractor vent cover, the mirror and any glass shelving, and the floor including the awkward run behind the toilet. Mould in grout lines and silicone is treated where it has taken hold.

Bedrooms and living areas

This is the floor-and-glazing room, so on the modern blocks it gets the most attention. We clean wide-plank engineered or laminate floors with the correct product and method, not a soaking mop that streaks and lifts a marginal floor further, working up the scuffs and dragged-furniture marks. Full-height windows, balcony glazing and any glass balustrade are cleaned both sides where access is safe, so there is no haze for the torch to catch. Skirtings, door frames and doors are wiped and scuff-cleaned, switches and sockets cleaned, fitted wardrobes done inside and out, and we dust the high lines, vents and the tops of doors and frames that clerks check on a step.

Throughout the flat

Internal glass and mirrored doors polished, all interior doors and frames cleaned, the entrance and any internal stairs and their carpet or hard floor done, light fittings and switch plates wiped, accessible vents and trickle vents cleared, skirtings throughout, and the floors finished last so nothing is re-walked. Cobwebs removed, internal bin areas cleaned, and the flat left aired and presentable for the clerk to photograph against check-in. That checklist is, in effect, the clerk’s report turned into a clean, which is how we hold a 97% first-time pass rate across the 300+ letting agents we work with and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits over the years.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

Pricing is flat and quoted up front, with no per-visit surprises. The figures below are full prices, not a promotion.

Most Surrey Docks flats are one and two beds, so the common numbers are the £207 and £243 ones, plus a carpet add-on only where a block still has carpeted bedrooms rather than the engineered floors most of the newer stock runs. If you would rather book by time than a whole-flat job, it is £30 per cleaner per hour. Carpet shampoo is £36 per bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. The oven is included in a move-out clean; as a standalone it is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range.

Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 against a deposit that on these blocks is often well north of £1,700 is not really a decision. The trouble is that most people only run that sum after they have tried a DIY check-out, failed it, and lost the first round, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win. Every job carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so if the clerk flags a cleanliness point inside 48 hours we are back to fix that exact point free, before the check-out is signed off.

Move-out, deep clean, regular clean: which one you actually need

People mix these up, so a quick steer. A move-out clean is scoped against your inventory and backed by the re-clean guarantee, and it is the only one of the three that gets a deposit back. A deep clean is for a flat you are staying in that needs a hard reset, thorough but not measured against a check-in report. A regular clean is upkeep, a few hours to keep the place straight. If your agent or your tenancy says the flat must be professionally cleaned to check-out standard, the move-out job is the one that meets it.

Booking it, and the month-end crush

Booking is short. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the SE16 postcode, the number of bedrooms and your check-out date. We give you a fixed price from the figures above and a time, usually the day before your inventory check-out so it is fresh for the clerk. Our cleaners arrive with everything, work the 57-point checklist room by room with the floors and glass finished last, and if the clerk flags anything within 48 hours we return and re-clean that point free under the guarantee.

Most jobs here are booked two or three days ahead. End-of-month and quarter-end fill fastest, because that is when tenancies turn over across SE16 and several blocks empty together, so the earlier you call the better the slot. If your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Surrey Docks?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Most flats around Greenland Dock, Marine Wharf and the marina are one or two beds, so £207 to £243 is the figure you will usually land on. Carpet shampoo and standalone oven cleaning sit on top as add-ons, and we quote the lot up front before we start.

Will the clean pass the inventory check-out?

That is the whole point of booking it. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate across the agents we work with, and we back every job with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the inventory clerk flags a cleanliness point within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and redo that exact point free, before your check-out is signed off and while nobody has moved in.

My dockside flat already looks spotless. Why would I still lose deposit?

Because the clerk judges it against your check-in photos with a torch held flat to the surface, not against normal daylight. On the newer SE16 blocks the usual catches are scuff lines on the pale engineered floor, a haze on the balcony glass and full-height windows, a greasy bloom on the handleless kitchen units at the cooking end, and a hard-water tide line inside the shower screen. None of it shows until the light rakes across it.

Why does the hard water here matter so much?

SE16 sits on Thames Water’s supply, which is very hard, around 253 mg/l of calcium carbonate in Rotherhithe. Over a tenancy it leaves a chalky film on glass shower screens, a crust on chrome mixers and rainfall heads, and a dull bloom on tap bases that a cloth will not move. Clerks on these blocks read built-up scale as neglect, so we descale every screen, head and mixer back to clear as part of the standard job, not as an extra.

Which streets and developments do you cover in Surrey Docks?

All of the SE16 dockland footprint. That includes Greenland Dock, Greenland Quay and Brunswick Quay, Finland Street, Norway Gate and Rope Street, the blocks fronting South Dock Marina, Plough Way and Yeoman Street toward Marine Wharf, Maple Quays and Ontario Point near Canada Water, and the townhouse rows backing onto Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill.

Do you move the appliances and clean behind them?

Yes, where they move out safely. We pull the fridge-freezer and the washer-dryer, clean behind and underneath, defrost the freezer if it needs it, and degrease the oven inside along with the door glass, racks and grill pan. The kitchen is where most Surrey Docks deposits are won or lost, so it gets the most attention.

Is the oven included, or is that charged separately?

On an end of tenancy job the oven is included, cleaned inside with the door glass, racks and grill pan back to bare metal. If the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on, we also clean it as a standalone job: £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range cooker.

How far ahead should I book?

Two or three days is usually enough, but the end of the month and quarter-end go first, because that is when tenancies turn over across SE16 and the new-build blocks empty out together. Book the clean for the day before your inventory check-out so the flat is fresh when the clerk walks it.

Do I need to supply any products or equipment?

No. Our cleaners bring everything, including the correct product for wide-plank engineered and laminate floors, so a marginal floor is not made worse by a soaking wet mop. You do not provide machines, cloths or anything else.

My flat has carpet in the bedrooms, not engineered floor. Can you do both?

Yes. Most of the newer dockside stock runs to engineered or laminate floors, which we clean as part of the job, but plenty of the 1980s and 1990s blocks still have carpeted bedrooms. We shampoo those at £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed.

I am a landlord with an HMO on the Surrey Docks ward. Does cleaning affect my licence?

Indirectly, yes. Southwark’s selective licensing designation names the Surrey Docks ward and runs from 1 November 2023 to 31 October 2028, and a borough-wide additional HMO scheme runs to 28 February 2027. Both carry property-condition standards the council can inspect, so a documented professional turnover clean between tenancies helps keep a licensed flat the right side of those checks.

Can you turn a flat around the same day between a check-out and a check-in?

Often, if the timings are tight but honest. Tell us the check-out and check-in times when you ring and we will say plainly whether a same-day turnaround on that flat is realistic, or whether it wants the morning before. We would rather tell you straight than promise a slot we cannot do properly.

What areas near Surrey Docks do you also cover?

We cover the whole SE16 peninsula and the rest of the borough through the Southwark hub, including the historic core at Rotherhithe Village along the river, the town-centre blocks around Canada Water, and the streets toward South Bermondsey.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Surrey Docks

Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Surrey Docks for the blocks that still have carpeted bedrooms, oven cleaning in Surrey Docks and domestic cleaning in Surrey Docks. For the wide-plank engineered and laminate floors and the balcony glazing that define the newer blocks, there is also our hard floor cleaning and window cleaning services.