The clean that decides your Walworth deposit
Walk down East Street on a Saturday and the stalls run from the Walworth Road almost to the railway, fruit and veg at one end, fabric and household bits at the other, the same pitch trading since 1880. That market is the heart of SE17. It is also why so many of the flats around here are lived in hard and let again fast, because Walworth has always been a place people move through. When your tenancy ends, the property has to go back to the agent in the state the inventory says you got it, and the cleaning is the line item that decides whether your deposit comes back whole.
Here is the short version. We are Monster Cleaning, a domestic firm working across Walworth and the rest of Southwark since 2014, and an end of tenancy clean from us starts at £156 for a studio and is built to pass the check-out inventory first time. The rest of this page is the detail: what gets deducted in SE17 and why, what the council’s licensing rules mean if you rent here, what we actually clean, and what it costs.
Where our Walworth jobs actually are
Most of our SE17 work sits in three kinds of building, and they clean differently. First, the old council blocks and the ex-council flats sold off under Right to Buy and now sublet, the ones strung along the Walworth Road and around the streets behind East Street. Second, the Victorian terraces and the live-work tenements of the Pullens Estate off Amelia Street, with their three connected yards, where the kitchens are small and the original floors are still down in places. Third, the new-build flats going up across the Aylesbury Estate as the 20-year rebuild grinds on between Elephant and Castle and Burgess Park, plus the finished blocks at Elephant Park on the old Heygate site.
Each one hands you a different cleaning problem. The ex-council kitchens tend to have older units where grease has worked into the hinges and the splashback grout. The Victorian conversions have skirting and cornice that hold dust no tenant ever reaches, and sash windows that an inventory clerk will run a finger along. The new-builds look easy and are not, because a check-in inventory taken on a pristine flat sets a high bar, and matt white walls and pale grouting show every mark.
We know the area at street level. We park where we can on the side roads off the Walworth Road and carry kit in, because the controlled parking zone and the narrow kerbs around East Street mean you rarely get a space outside the door. Almost everything here is reachable off the buses down the Walworth Road, the 12, 35, 40, 68, 148, 171 and 176, or a short walk from Elephant and Castle on the Bakerloo and Northern lines. If you are nearer the Kennington end on the Northern line, that is fine too. We have cleaned flats on both sides of that border for years.
The new-builds look easy and are not, because a check-in inventory taken on a pristine flat sets a high bar, and matt white walls and pale grouting show every mark.
Walworth also runs on short tenancies and quick turnarounds. A lot of the private lets here are managed by agents who book the same kind of end of tenancy clean again and again, and they have seen every standard of work. That cuts both ways. A clean that would scrape through somewhere quieter gets challenged here, because the agent has a clerk who checks properly and a waiting tenant who wants the flat spotless on day one.
There is a lot of history packed into these streets, and it shows in the buildings. The blue plaque on the corner of East Street and the Walworth Road marks where Charlie Chaplin is thought to have been born, and the market itself is the one that opens the title sequence of Only Fools and Horses. St Peter’s Church on Liverpool Grove, a Sir John Soane design from around 1825, still anchors the conservation area around it. This was the old parish of St Mary Newington, the manor of Walworth, and the Cuming family’s collection of local objects came out of exactly this patch. None of that changes how you clean a flat, but it tells you why the housing is such a jumble of ages, from Georgian survivors to 1960s council slabs to glass-fronted new-builds, all within a few minutes’ walk.
Burgess Park sits along the south-east edge, one of the largest parks in inner London, built over bombed-out streets and a filled-in canal. Flats backing onto it carry tree pollen and park dust in summer that you do not get on the Walworth Road side, and window sills near the park need more attention at check-out for that reason. Small thing, but it is the kind of thing we have learned by cleaning here rather than reading about the area.
What Southwark licensing means for your let
If you let a property in Walworth, the council’s licensing rules probably touch you, and they matter at check-out more than people expect. Walworth sits in the North Walworth ward, and that ward is one of the areas Southwark Council brought into its second selective licensing scheme on 1 November 2023, running for five years to late 2028. Selective licensing means almost every privately rented home in those wards needs a licence from the council, whether or not it is a shared house. The scheme was designated under Part 3 of the Housing Act 2004.
On top of that, Southwark runs a borough-wide additional licensing scheme for smaller houses in multiple occupation, the ones with three or more tenants sharing, which started on 1 March 2022 and runs to 1 March 2027. Between the two, a large share of Walworth’s rental stock is licensed, and licensed property comes with conditions on its condition and management. (Southwark’s own licensing pages can be slow to load and sometimes block automated checks, so if you are confirming your own position, ring the council’s housing team rather than relying on a cached page.)
Why does any of this land on a cleaner’s page? Because licensed lets are inspected more closely, and agents managing them keep tighter inventories. A landlord under a selective licence has a stronger reason to insist the flat comes back in inventory condition, and a clerk doing the check-out on a licensed property tends to document everything. The cleaning standard expected at the end is simply higher, and a deduction is more likely to be itemised and defended. The deposit rules themselves have not changed: your deposit must sit in a government-approved tenancy deposit protection scheme, and a landlord can only keep money for genuine reasons, not for fair wear and tear.
The wider law is shifting too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 reforms private renting in England and changes how tenancies end, but it does not touch the basic deal on deposits and cleaning: you hand the property back clean, and a fair deduction has to be evidenced against the check-in inventory. Get the clean right and there is nothing to argue about.
One practical effect of the licensing here is worth spelling out. Because North Walworth has been a designated ward since late 2023, the agents who work this patch have spent two years tightening how they manage and inspect their stock. Check-out reports have got longer and more photographic. We have watched clerks turn up with a phone and a tripod where five years ago they came with a clipboard and a quick eye. That is good for an honest tenant, because a properly documented inventory is harder to fudge in either direction, but it means the cleaning has to actually be there in the photos rather than merely looking right from the doorway.
The 57-point list and what a clerk checks
Our cleaners arrive with a 57-point agent-approved checklist, and it is the same list the better letting agents around Walworth use when they assess a check-out. That is the point of it. We are not guessing what the clerk wants, because the list was built from what clerks actually mark down.
It covers the obvious and the things tenants forget. Inside and on top of every cupboard and wardrobe. Skirting boards, door frames, light switches and the tops of doors. Every appliance, in and out, including the oven, the hob, the extractor and the fridge seals. Limescale off the taps, the shower screen and the tiles. Windows cleaned inside, sills and tracks wiped, mirrors and glass left without a smear. Carpets and any upholstery hoovered through, hard floors washed. Cobwebs down, switch plates wiped, the lot.
A check-out clerk works the room in a set order, and they look where dirt hides rather than where it shows. The top edge of a door. The runner under a sash window. The grout behind a cooker. The underside of a toilet rim. The seal around a washing machine door, where black mould loves to sit in a flat that has been steamy and shut up. Our list mirrors that order, which is how we hit a 97% first-time pass rate across the work we do.
The list is not a sales gimmick, it is a working document the cleaners tick off as they go. It splits the flat into zones, the kitchen, each bathroom, every bedroom, the hallway and the living space, and assigns the fiddly items to each. In the kitchen alone there are points for the oven cavity, the oven door glass, the hob, the extractor filter, the splashback, the cupboard fronts and interiors, the worktops, the sink and taps, the floor edges and the bin area. A clerk in Walworth knows that list as well as we do, because the agents share the same standard, and that shared expectation is what keeps a check-out from turning into an argument about whose idea of clean is right.
What the list does not do is read your tenancy agreement for you. If your contract says the carpets were professionally cleaned at the start, or the oven was new, the standard you owe at the end is higher, and the clerk will hold you to the specific wording. We will flag it when we see it, but the agreement is the thing that governs, so dig it out before you book.
And if a clerk does flag something, we come back. The 48-hour re-clean guarantee means that if the inventory clerk or the agent challenges our work within three days, we return and put it right at no cost. We have leaned on that promise enough times across Southwark to know it holds. It is also why 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.
What it costs to have us do it
We price an end of tenancy clean by the size of the property, not by the hour, so you know the figure before we start and the team stays until the job is done. A studio is £156. A one-bed flat is £207. A two-bed is £243. A three-bed is £339, and a four-bed is £425. Those are the full prices, the same any day of the week, weekends included.
Pricing by size suits Walworth, because the flats here vary so much. A one-bed in a Pullens tenement and a one-bed in a finished Elephant Park block are different jobs, but the bedroom count is what the agent’s inventory is keyed to, so it is a fair basis. The cleaners are not watching a clock, which matters when an ex-council kitchen needs an extra hour on the units that an hourly job would never give it.
If you would rather buy time than a whole clean, our by-the-hour rate is £30 per cleaner, which works for a part-clean or a top-up when you have done most of it yourself. Carpets are charged on top: £36 for a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 to do a whole two-bed flat. Oven cleaning, if you want it pulled apart and degreased properly, is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker.
It is worth doing the sums against what a deposit deduction actually costs. An agent who books a contractor to clean a flat you left half-done will charge that back to you at their rate, not ours, and a carpet flagged as needing professional cleaning can take a chunk out of the deposit on its own. Paying £243 for a two-bed clean that passes first time is usually cheaper than losing £300 or £400 in deductions and then trying to claw it back through the scheme. That is the maths most of our Walworth tenants are weighing up, and it is why they call.
We do not charge extra for the building being awkward, either. A top-floor flat in a Pullens block with no lift, or a maisonette over two levels off the Walworth Road, takes us longer, but the price is still keyed to the bedroom count. The flats here are old and odd as often as not, and a fixed-by-size price means you are not penalised for living somewhere with character.
To book or to get a price for an odd-shaped flat, call us on 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected]. We are at 255 Upper Richmond Road West, SW14 8QS, and we cover Walworth seven days a week.
The jobs that eat deposits in SE17
Some deductions come up again and again on Walworth check-outs. The oven is the worst offender. Tenants clean the door glass and leave the roof of the oven and the trays, and that is exactly where a clerk looks. We pull the appliance apart, soak the racks and degrease the cavity, because a half-done oven is the single most common reason a deposit gets docked.
Limescale is the next one, and it is worse here than people expect. London’s water is hard, and in flats where the shower runs daily the screen, the taps and the tiles fur up fast. A clerk drags a nail across a tap to test it. We take the scale off properly so there is nothing to find.
Then there is the building stock itself. The ex-council kitchens have dated units where grease creeps into hinges and handles. The Victorian terraces hold dust on cornicing and picture rails that nobody has touched in a year, and the old floorboards need the right treatment rather than a wet mop. New-build bathrooms have pale silicone and grout that shows mould the moment a flat has been left damp. We clean to the check-in standard for each, not to a generic idea of clean.
Carpets are their own battle. A lot of Walworth lets came carpeted, and a hoover does not lift a year of ground-in traffic from a hallway. We use hot water extraction, which pulls the dirt out of the pile rather than smearing it across the top, and it is the difference between a carpet that passes and one the clerk notes as needing professional cleaning. If your tenancy agreement says the carpets were professionally cleaned at check-in, you will usually be expected to match that, and a receipt for the work settles the argument.
Two more catch people out here. The first is the window glass and frames. In the older terraces and the Pullens tenements the windows are part of what a clerk inspects closely, sills, tracks and all, and on the higher floors the outsides need doing too if the check-in shots showed them clean. We clean the insides as standard and can sort the outside with water-fed poles where access allows. The second is general grease film, the invisible layer that builds on kitchen walls and the tops of units in a flat where someone has cooked daily for a year. It does not show until a clerk wipes a cloth across it and the cloth comes back grey. We degrease those surfaces because we know that test is coming.
Mould is the one that genuinely worries tenants, and Walworth’s older stock gets it. A bathroom with poor ventilation, a bedroom on a cold north wall, a kitchen that steams up, all of them grow mould in the silicone and along the seals. We clean it back rather than paint over it, because a clerk knows the difference and so does the next tenant. Where it has gone into the fabric of the wall that becomes the landlord’s repair, not a cleaning job, and we will tell you honestly which is which.
End of tenancy, deep clean, or a regular tidy
People mix these three up, and booking the wrong one costs money. They are not the same job.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full clean of an empty property against the check-out inventory, top to bottom, built to return your deposit. This is what an agent expects when you move out. It is the service most of this page is about.
- Deep clean
- A heavy one-off clean of a property you are staying in, for when things have got away from you or you have just moved in. Thorough, but not keyed to an inventory. We offer it through our deep cleaning service if that is what you actually need.
- Regular clean
- A weekly or fortnightly tidy to keep a home ticking over. Useful, but it will not get a flat through a check-out on its own, because it is not built for that.
- Check-in inventory
- The report a clerk writes at the start of a tenancy describing the flat’s condition. Your check-out is measured against it, so the cleaner’s job is to return the flat to that documented state.
- Selective licence
- A council permit a landlord needs to rent out a home in a designated ward, such as North Walworth, under Part 3 of the Housing Act 2004.
If you are unsure which you need, tell us the situation when you call and we will say so honestly. There is no point selling you an end of tenancy clean when a deep clean would do, or the reverse when a deposit is on the line.
For the deposit itself, the rules are worth knowing. Citizens Advice sets out how to ask for your deposit back and what a landlord can and cannot deduct, and Shelter covers the dispute route if it goes wrong. Your deposit has to be held in one of the government-approved schemes set out on gov.uk, and that scheme runs the adjudication if you and the landlord disagree.
Booking us around your move
Booking is meant to be simple. Tell us the address, the number of bedrooms, and the day you need the flat done, and we give you a fixed price on the spot. We work seven days a week across Walworth, so a Sunday clean costs the same as a Tuesday one. Moving days fall where they fall, and we book around them.
One thing to get right. The property needs electricity, running hot water, and your belongings cleared out before we arrive, because we cannot clean a kitchen with the units still full or a carpet under a sofa that is staying. Once it is empty and the utilities are on, we can do the whole flat in one visit.
We bring everything, all the cleaning supplies and machines, so you do not provide anything. The team works through the 57-point list, and we tell you when it is done. If the agent’s clerk comes back to us inside three days with anything, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee covers a free return.
Most of our Walworth bookings come through letting agents, but plenty of tenants call us directly, especially toward the end of the month when leases turn over. Book a few days ahead if you can, because that end-of-month window fills up. If you need other rooms or services sorted at the same time, look at our oven cleaning and carpet cleaning pages, both common add-ons on an SE17 move.
A word on access and timing, because Walworth has its quirks. The controlled parking zone runs across most of SE17 in the working day, so if you can leave a permit or a bay free near the door it speeds the load-in, though we manage without when we have to. Moves on the Aylesbury and Elephant Park estates sometimes need a concierge or a service-lift booking, and it is worth checking that before the day so the team is not stuck waiting in a lobby. If you tell us which block you are in when you book, we will usually know the drill already.
We send a team sized to the flat, so a studio might be one or two cleaners and a four-bed several, and they bring the machines for carpets and ovens in the van. You do not need to be there the whole time. Plenty of tenants let us in, hand over a key or arrange it through the agent, and come back to a finished flat. Whatever suits your moving day.
We also cover the streets around here, so if your move involves more than one address you can read about our work in Elephant and Castle, Kennington and Camberwell, or see the full end of tenancy cleaning in Southwark hub for the rest of the borough.
Questions Walworth tenants ask us
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Walworth?
It depends on size. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. The price is fixed by bedroom count, not by the hour, and it is the same on weekends.
Will the clean get my deposit back?
The cleaning will not be the reason it is withheld, which is the part we control. We clean to the 57-point agent checklist and hold a 97% first-time pass rate, and if a clerk challenges the work we re-clean free within 48 hours.
Do you clean flats on the Aylesbury and Elephant Park estates?
Yes, regularly. We clean new-build flats across the Elephant Park site and the rebuilt parts of the Aylesbury Estate, as well as the older council and ex-council blocks around the Walworth Road.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or letting agent flags our clean within three days of us finishing, we come back and put it right at no extra cost. It is our standard guarantee on every end of tenancy job.
Does my Walworth rental need a selective licence?
Quite possibly. Walworth is in the North Walworth ward, which Southwark Council brought into selective licensing on 1 November 2023 for five years, so most privately rented homes there need a council licence. Check with Southwark’s housing team for your exact address.
Do you clean ovens as part of the service?
Oven cleaning is included in the end of tenancy clean. If you want it done as a standalone job, we pull the appliance apart and degrease it: £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker.
Can you clean carpets at the same time?
Yes. We use hot water extraction, which lifts ground-in dirt rather than spreading it. Carpets are £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat, charged on top of the clean.
How far in advance should I book?
A few days is usually enough, but the last week of the month fills up fast because that is when most leases end. If your move is at month-end, book as early as you can.
Do you work weekends in SE17?
Yes, seven days a week, and a weekend clean costs the same as a weekday one. We book around your moving date rather than the other way round.
What do I need to do before you arrive?
Clear the flat of your belongings and make sure the electricity and hot water are on. We cannot clean inside full cupboards or under furniture that is staying, so an empty property gets the best result.
Do you bring your own cleaning equipment?
We bring all of it: machines, cloths and detergents. You do not need to leave anything behind or buy supplies for us.
Is end of tenancy cleaning different from a deep clean?
Yes. An end of tenancy clean is for an empty property and is measured against the check-out inventory. A deep clean is a heavy one-off for a home you are living in and is not keyed to an inventory.
Can a landlord deduct money if I have the flat professionally cleaned?
Not for cleaning if the property is left to the check-in standard. A landlord can only keep deposit money for genuine reasons, not for fair wear and tear, and a receipt for professional cleaning is strong evidence in a dispute.
Do you cover the rest of Southwark?
We do. We work right across the borough, including Elephant and Castle, Kennington and Camberwell, and you can book any SE address through the same number.