Telegraph Hill end of tenancy cleaning, sorted

On a Telegraph Hill flat the inventory clerk goes for the picture rail first. Run a finger along it and you can read three years of a tenancy in one grey line, because on these late-Victorian terraces the original rails sit at head height and nobody ever dusts them. That stroke tells the clerk how the rest of the clean was done. So end of tenancy here is built to answer the person writing the check-out report, not to look tidy: a 57-point agent-approved checklist, £30 per hour per cleaner for a part job, and a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover SE14 across Telegraph Hill and New Cross Gate, plus the SE4 side of the hill toward Brockley Cross where the boundary runs. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lewisham.

How the check-in report quietly decides your deposit

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody does, and it settles everything that follows. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photos, usually with “good” or “as new” against the kitchen, bathroom and woodwork. Those words held on the day, because the flat had just had a professional clean. At check-out a different clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely gets you over the line.

The money is not abstract. On the SE14 DIY check-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a familiar shape: the oven, the shower screen and its scaled tracks, the grout band where the bath meets the tiles, the gaps behind the fridge and cooker, and the picture rails and cornicing that carry a fur of dust visible from the doorway. Put that against a deposit capped at five weeks’ rent, which on a Telegraph Hill two-bed is real money, and the sums answer themselves. Most tenants only run those sums after they have tried, failed the check, and lost the first round. The first round is the cheap one to win.

You are being marked against a professional clean, which is why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely gets you over the line.

Two things sit behind this in law and pull in opposite directions. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means a landlord cannot write professional cleaning into the tenancy as a condition, so nobody can force you to book us. Damp and mould, on the other hand, are a landlord repair duty under the Homes Act 2018, not a tenant cleaning failure. Where we find real damp behind a wardrobe on a cold rear wall, we photograph it and note it, so the charge sits where it belongs rather than on your deposit.

Why a Haberdashers estate cleans differently to a new-build

Telegraph Hill is not accidental housing. The whole hill was laid out from 1871 by the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, who owned the land and set strict rules to keep it a respectable middle-class estate: matching terraces, matching pairs of villas, the same materials street after street. That planning is why the flats here share a set of problems. Where a landlord has carved one of those tall houses into a garden flat and an upper conversion, half the original detail is still in place above your head, and none of it gets touched in a normal three-year let.

So the clean is a period-property clean, not a wipe-round. Ornate cornicing in the front room holds cobwebs in the deep curves, ceiling roses collect dust in the mouldings, and the picture rails, deep skirtings and reveals around the tall windows all carry grime that a clerk on this estate is briefed to check, because they know what these houses are. We bring the extending dusters and the right brushes for the mouldings, and we treat original paint and plaster gently, because a scuffed original architrave is a bigger deduction than a missed shelf. Later infill and the odd purpose-built block sit in the mix too, and they are quicker, but the bulk of the work up here is careful hand-work on old detail.

What 1 May 2026 changed for a Telegraph Hill move-out

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has become a periodic tenancy, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting out a fixed term.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change one line. The Tenant Fees Act still applies, the check-in benchmark still applies, and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing. This corner of Lewisham already turns over fast, with a heavy student and postgraduate share around Goldsmiths and a lot of one-year professional lets, and rolling notice makes the move-outs more frequent and far less predictable. The practical takeaway is dull and it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want goes first.

The licensing question landlords keep getting wrong

Lewisham licenses more of its rented stock than most London boroughs, and Telegraph Hill sits inside it. New Cross ward, which covers the hill, is in Designation 1 of the council’s selective licensing scheme that started on 1 July 2024 and runs for five years, so a great many ordinary single-let flats up here now need a licence, well beyond the shared houses. On top of that the borough has run an additional HMO scheme covering all its wards since 5 April 2022, and the national mandatory HMO rules apply to the larger sharer houses too. Landlords check the position for a given address on the council’s own pages, where Lewisham publishes the ward list.

Why it matters to a cleaner. A licensed property is on the council’s books, gets inspected, and carries stricter cleanliness expectations at handover than an unlicensed private let, because the licence can hinge on the condition between tenancies. So the bar on a licensed Erlanger Road or Kitto Road flat is higher, the agent is more thorough at the check, and the clean has to be documented, photographed before and after.

Check-in inventory report

The document the clerk writes on day one describing every surface, usually with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a vague idea of “clean”.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, against the letting-agent standard, with the flat empty and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it. £30 per hour per cleaner for a part job.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are staying in, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £22 an hour on a weekly visit.

The 57 things we go through, room by room

Every Telegraph Hill booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what SE14 clerks flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it first. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of the deposit goes

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks soak, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. That film is the single most-flagged oven fault we see on the hill. Hob rings and burners come off, control knobs off and washed, the extractor hood degreased inside and out and its filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard, inside and out, including the deep awkward-cornered ones in these older kitchens. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them, and the integrated units get their own attention. Appliances are pulled out so the gaps behind and under the fridge, dishwasher and washing machine are cleaned, then put back. The washing machine itself gets the drum, the detergent drawer scrubbed, and the door seal, which is the first thing a clerk opens. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled, tiles and grout scrubbed, bins washed, floor hoovered and mopped.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Limescale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first. Grout is treated for the pink mould band along the silicone, and the silicone joins around bath and basin are checked for mildew, which after two tenancies has usually gone. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk does
• Shower screen both sides, tracks and the sealant bead included
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they lift off the wall
• Extractor fan grille removed and the housing vacuumed, because on the internal windowless bathrooms in the stacked flats that grille turns grey with fluff inside a year
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin

Bedrooms, living rooms and everything between

Picture rails and cornicing dusted with the extender, ceiling roses done, light fittings wiped with the shade lowered where it comes down. Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard, top, sides and drawer bases. Skirtings wet-wiped, behind every freestanding piece of furniture vacuumed. Windows cleaned both faces, the tall sash windows on the front elevation given slow work on the meeting rail and the runners, which is where the dust the colour of old chimneys sits. Cills dusted and damp-wiped, radiators done behind and on top, the period cast-iron ones taking longer than a modern panel. Walls spot-wiped for marks with an honest line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s job, not a scrub. Carpets vacuumed both directions, then steam-cleaned if you have booked it. Throughout: switches and sockets, internal doors both sides plus the top edge, handles polished, frames dusted, the hall and landing floors mopped, the banister wiped, every threshold hoovered along the carpet edge, and all the reachable cobwebs cleared. Then a final walk-through, photographed room by room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

What hard water does to an SE14 bathroom

Telegraph Hill is on the Thames Water supply, and that water is hard, running about 289 mg per litre of calcium carbonate for the SE14 area on the company’s own figures, which you can check on thameswater.co.uk. Scale builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for it. They run a thumbnail down the tap, they look at the shower screen edge-on against the light, they pull the shower head in close. Scale that has set into chrome is not a quick job, so we soak taps and shower heads in a proper descaler and rebuild the fitting where the flow has dropped, rather than smearing the surface and hoping.

Grout and the toilet bowl are the two that catch people out. Kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a deduction here more often than anything to do with carpets, so 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. The inside of the pan carries a scale ring that a brush alone will not shift and a descaler will. None of it is exotic. It is the difference between a clean that looks done in the moment and one that survives a clerk with a torch.

“We had a top-floor conversion on Erlanger Road for two years, and the bathroom was the bit I dreaded, an internal one with no window and scale on everything. Monster did the extractor grille and the shower screen tracks properly and got the taps back to shining. The clerk signed it off with nothing flagged and the full deposit came back inside two weeks.”
Priya, ex-tenant, Erlanger Road SE14, May 2026

Telegraph Hill street by street, from the park down to the depot

The hill is small but the stock changes as you cross it, so we work it by pocket, not as one block. The two halves of Telegraph Hill Park split it either side of Kitto Road, the upper park on the site of the old semaphore station that once flashed news of Waterloo to London, the lower park with its ponds, playground and the statue of Olaudah Equiano in the African Garden. Around that green core the terraces run down toward New Cross Gate on one side and the SE4 boundary on the other.

The park streets and the top of the hill

Kitto Road, Erlanger Road, Jerningham Road and Kestrel Avenue sit up near the parks, and these are the biggest of the villa conversions, three and four storeys sliced into garden, middle and top-floor flats. The tall front sash windows are the recurring failure point, because the lower meeting rail is out of easy reach and the runners hold dust nobody dusts, and the cornicing and rails need the careful pass. Family houses kept whole are scattered in here too, and they take longer because there is more of them.

Pepys Road, Drakefell Road and the working streets

Pepys Road runs large bay-fronted houses, several still single-family but most carved into top-floor and garden flats, and the bay corners where the beading meets the cill are where mildew has sat for years. Drakefell Road is the long spine where the SE14 and SE4 postcodes meet, mid-Victorian to Edwardian, mostly split and stacked, so the bathrooms are often internal and windowless. The New Cross bus depot fills the block between Troutbeck Road and Pepys Road with room for around 300 buses, which is worth knowing on a move-out day because the traffic and parking round there run to the depot’s timetable, not yours.

Toward New Cross Gate and Goldsmiths

Down the slope the flats get smaller and the student and postgraduate share climbs, with a lot of Goldsmiths lets running on the tight September-to-June cycle. In those the kitchen extractor and the oven door glass are almost always the flags, because the glass has usually never come apart and a clerk who knows the trick will pop the inner panel and find years of grime. The Telegraph Hill Centre, the old church hall, and the shops on New Cross Road anchor this end. We run New Cross, New Cross Gate and Brockley Cross on the same days, so this is one of our denser patches.

Not sure which side of the postcode line your flat is on, SE14 or SE4? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the address and we will tell you in about ten seconds. We charge the same rate either side.

What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until it is too late

Telegraph Hill sits in our base pricing band, the same as New Cross, Brockley and Honor Oak. There is no premium loaded on for the conservation-area postcode, whatever a quote elsewhere might say.

Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy 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 rather than after. Carpets and upholstery are priced separately because they need different machines and a longer dry window. There is no minimum above the studio rate, and no surcharge for an evening or weekend slot.

Now run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect a five-week deposit is barely a decision. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent or the clerk flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside the window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate across London EOT jobs sits at 97%, and the SE14 numbers sit inside that. There is a reason the agents round here know 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 number is the whole job: money that stays with the tenant.

A Kitto Road job from March

“Two of us moved out of a Kitto Road two-bed after three years, right by the park. The agent had flagged the oven and the cornicing at the check-in, so we knew they would look. Monster sent two cleaners for six hours, took the oven glass apart, did the picture rails and the sash runners, and shampooed the bedroom carpets on top. I had braced for a fight over the deposit and there wasn’t one. Full amount back, no deductions. Best money we spent on the whole move.”
Tom, Kitto Road SE14, March 2026

That job is a fair example of the pattern up near the parks: a longer let, an oven nobody had dealt with, original detail the inventory named individually, and an agent who checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was on the line, as it usually does. What turned it was not only the scrubbing but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, the part most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it, and the festival-weekend snag

Booking is quick and there is no deposit to hold a slot. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your address, postcode, move-out date and bedroom count. A couple of WhatsApp photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen it.
2. We send a written quote the same working day with a slot offered. We aim to put you in three to five working days before the inventory check, not the morning of, so any re-clean falls inside the 48-hour window.
3. You confirm and we hold the slot. No deposit needed.
4. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared. We run the checklist and send photos of the trickier areas, the oven inner glass, the extractor and the picture rails, for your records.
5. Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free. We do not argue.

One honest local note. The Telegraph Hill Festival runs in early March and parking on Pepys Road and Erlanger Road gets tight for the weekend, and the streets round the bus depot are awkward at the best of times. We can still work a festival weekend, we just budget extra time to carry kit from a side street, so tell us the parking arrangement when you book, whether that is a visitor permit, a bay or an agent key drop.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning for a Telegraph Hill flat?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207 and a two-bed split flat £243, which is our base SE14 rate with no conservation-area premium. Three-beds are £339 and four-beds £425. Carpet shampoo and oven cleaning are add-ons, itemised on the quote.

Do you cover both the SE14 and SE4 sides of Telegraph Hill?

Yes. The hill straddles the SE14 and SE4 boundary at roughly Drakefell Road, and we work both sides at the same rate. New Cross Gate and Brockley Cross are both on our regular Lewisham rota, so this is a dense patch for us.

What does the 48-hour re-clean guarantee actually mean?

If your letting agent or the inventory clerk flags any cleanliness issue within 48 hours of our clean, we come back and put it right free, as long as you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. We have held to it on every job since 2014, and over that time we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits.

Is my deposit safe with the tenancy deposit schemes if I use you?

The scheme is separate from us. Your landlord protects the deposit with one of the three approved schemes, the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits or the DPS. Our job is to get the flat to a standard the clerk signs off, so it returns in full or with minimal deduction. If it ever goes to adjudication, our dated invoice and photo report are admissible evidence, and Shelter’s guidance walks through the steps.

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

From 1 May 2026, Section 21 evictions are abolished and every assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, so you can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning obligations at end of tenancy did not change. The real effect on Telegraph Hill is more frequent and less predictable move-outs, so book as early as you can.

How long does an EOT clean take in a Telegraph Hill conversion?

A one-bed runs about four to five hours with two cleaners. A two-bed split conversion is six to seven hours with two, longer if there is carpet shampoo because of the dry time. We send a team that has done period flats before, so the picture rails and cornicing do not slow us down.

Do I need to be there during the clean?

No. Most clients on the hill let us in, hand over keys and pick them up after the inventory check. We are happy to coordinate directly with the letting agent if they are holding the keys at their office.

Do you handle the period features on these houses?

Yes. Most of Telegraph Hill is the 1870s Haberdashers estate, so cornicing, ceiling roses, picture rails, deep skirtings and tall sash windows are the norm. We use appropriate products on original paint and plaster and we do not put anything aggressive near the detail the inventory report lists.

Do you bring your own equipment and products?

Yes. Vacuums, mops, cloths, the extending dusters for the high cornicing, descaler, oven solution and glass polish, the lot. You do not need to provide anything but water and electricity.

Can you do same-day or next-day in Telegraph Hill?

Sometimes, depending on the rota. SE14 is one of our denser zones because we run New Cross, New Cross Gate and Brockley on the same day. Ring first thing and we will tell you what is possible.

Do you work with the local letting agents?

We work with most of them across the hill and New Cross, from the branches on New Cross Road to the independents around Telegraph Hill itself. Across our 300+ letting agents network we know the inventory standard each firm applies, and we clean to it.

What is the water like for scale?

Hard. Telegraph Hill is on the Thames Water supply, which runs about 289 mg per litre of calcium carbonate for SE14 on the company’s published figures. Shower heads, kettles, taps and the inside of the toilet all build scale, so we treat it with a proper descaler and rebuild taps where the flow has dropped.

What if I am moving in, not out?

We do move-in cleans to the same checklist depth, often booked the day after the previous tenant’s EOT clean. It is the same job from our side, the brief just changes from handing back to a clerk to getting it ready for you. Pricing matches the bands above.