What a Well Hall clean is really up against
The Progress Estate was thrown up in ten months of 1915, 1,086 houses and 212 flats, to put roofs over the heads of skilled workers at Woolwich Arsenal during the first war. Frank Baines and the Office of Works designed it on garden-suburb lines, with steep tiled roofs deliberately varied house to house, planted verges, hedged footpaths and two greens. It is a conservation area now, and a lovely place to live. It is also a properly awkward place to hand back clean.
That single fact shapes most of our work in SE9. These are not glass-and-laminate new-builds where a clean is a wipe and a hoover. The estate cottages, and the Edwardian and interwar houses that surround them up towards Eltham Palace, carry the kind of detail that traps dust and grime in places a quick going-over never reaches.
If you have rented one of these houses, you already know the rooms are generous and the finishes are old. That is the whole problem in one sentence.
The deposit maths most Eltham tenants get wrong
Start with the money, because that is what this is about. Your deposit is held in one of three government-backed schemes, and the rules on it are not vague. Your landlord or agent has to protect it within 30 days of taking it, and at the end has to return it within 10 days of you both agreeing the figure, as the gov.uk guidance on deposit protection sets out plainly. The scheme is not the hard part. The agreement on the figure is.
That figure is where cleaning bites. The schemes are clear that money can only come off for genuine reasons, and that fair wear and tear is not one of them. A scuff on a wall after two years is wear. Built-up grease on the hob is not, and neither is a bathroom furred with scale. Citizens Advice spells out how to get your deposit back, and one line in there matters more than the rest: keep the receipt if you paid for a professional clean, because it is evidence you can put in front of an adjudicator.
Here is the bit tenants miss. The check-in inventory, taken the day you moved in, is the benchmark. The property has to come back to that standard, not to spotless and not to lived-in, but to the photographed state of day one. If the kitchen was deep cleaned before you arrived, it needs deep cleaning before you leave. We have watched people lose a fair slice of an SE9 deposit simply because they cleaned to their own standard rather than the report’s.
The property has to come back to that standard, not to spotless and not to lived-in, but to the photographed state of day one.
If it does come to a dispute, every scheme has a free adjudication service, and the adjudicator works from evidence. They weigh the check-in inventory against the check-out report and whatever photographs and receipts each side puts forward. There is a deadline, usually within three months of you moving out, so it is not something to leave for a rainy day. A landlord who wants to charge for cleaning has to show the property was worse than at check-in, and a tenant who has a professional clean and a dated receipt has already won most of that argument before it starts.
This is the gap we sell against. Over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and almost none of those people were dirty. They were busy, or they ran out of time on moving day, or they did not know a clerk would run a finger along the top of a door frame. A booked clean with a receipt closes that gap. The invoice itself carries real value here. It is the document that ends the conversation when an agent floats a cleaning charge, and it costs you nothing extra to keep.
What the clerk checks in an SE9 house
An inventory clerk has a route through a property, and it rarely matches the route a tenant cleans. They start high and finish low, and they look at the bits you stopped seeing months ago. Knowing that route is half the job.
In the kitchen the oven is the first thing opened and the most common single deduction we see across Eltham. Glass door, inner panes, the runners, the back wall, the racks. A wipe does not pass; carbon has to come off with a soak and a scrape. Extractor filters, the splashback, the seals around the sink, the inside of the washing machine drawer and its rubber gasket, the fridge once it is off and defrosted. Clerks open everything in here.
The bathroom is the second front. Scale on the taps and the showerhead, grout that has gone grey, the silicone line where the bath meets the tiles, the extractor cover, the toilet base and hinges. A lot of SE9 bathrooms are on the older side, plumbed years ago, and scale builds fast on that kind of fitting.
Then the parts that are specific to these houses. Picture rails and dado rails, where they survive, collect a felt of dust along the top edge. Deep skirtings, the same. The leaded casement windows want cleaning in the reveals and along the frames, with the glass itself only half the task. Original internal doors have panel mouldings that hold grime in the grooves. None of this is hard, but all of it takes time and a person who is looking for it.
The floors are their own chapter. Plenty of the estate houses kept their original boards, and a clerk checks the edges and the corners where a hoover skips and a mop leaves a tide line. Tiled hallways, common in the Edwardian houses nearby, show every smear. Carpets get lifted at the edge to check the gripper line. If the place has had pets, and a lot of family houses here have, the skirtings and the carpet edges are exactly where a clerk sniffs out what a quick vacuum left behind.
Light fittings, switches and sockets get a look too, along with radiators, which collect dust down the back and along the top fins. Curtains and blinds, if they belong to the landlord, are on the list. The clerk will open the airing cupboard and the under-stairs cupboard, because tenants almost never clean inside them. None of it is exotic. It is just thorough, and thoroughness is what these older houses invite.
Our 57-point checklist is built around exactly this route, room by room, top to bottom, because it grew out of years of reading the reports that come back. We follow it in the same order a clerk inspects, which is why our 97% first-time pass rate holds up on housing this old. The checklist is also the thing your agent recognises, and it doubles as the paper trail if a deduction is ever queried.
What we clean, and what it costs
The price depends on the size of the property, not on how long it takes. That is deliberate. An end-of-tenancy clean on a Progress Estate cottage can run longer than the same job on a flat, and we would rather quote on bedrooms than watch a clock and rush the bits that matter.
For a Well Hall property our end-of-tenancy prices start at £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bedroom, £243 for two bedrooms, £339 for three bedrooms and £425 for four. Those are full cleans against the checklist, supplies and machines included, with the end of tenancy cleaning across Greenwich covered to the same standard whichever part of the borough you are in.
The clean is not charged by the hour. The team stays as long as the property needs to meet the inventory standard. If you would rather have cleaners by the hour for a part-job, say a single room or a quick turnaround, that is £30 per cleaner per hour, but for an end of tenancy the fixed price is almost always the better deal and there are no surprises on the invoice.
What is in it: the full kitchen as above, every bathroom, all floors hoovered or mopped, every reachable surface dusted including the high trims these houses carry, woodwork wiped, internal glass done, cobwebs cleared, bins cleaned. Limescale removed from the taps and tiles. The interior windows are part of the standard clean. Exterior glass on a house is a separate job, and we will say so when we quote rather than leave it as a nasty line at the end.
One quiet point that saves arguments: we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, which means a good number of the offices on Eltham High Street already recognise our paperwork. When the invoice and the checklist come from a name the agent knows, the conversation about your deposit gets shorter.
The deductions that come up most in SE9
After years of check-out reports landing on our desk, the same handful of charges turn up again and again on Well Hall tenancies. Worth naming them, because if you know them you can either clean for them or book us to.
The oven leads every time. A hazed door and carbon on the back wall is the single most common cleaning deduction in this part of Greenwich, and it is the one tenants most often underestimate. Limescale is second, on bathroom taps, showerheads and the glass screen, because the water here leaves its mark fast on older fittings. Third is the stuff up high: the tops of doors, picture rails, wardrobe tops and extractor hoods, all of it out of eyeline and all of it checked.
After that it spreads out. Grease behind a freestanding cooker, where nobody ever moves it. The washing machine drawer and door seal, furred with detergent and damp. Window reveals on the leaded casements. Skirtings and carpet edges in a house that had a dog. Fridge and freezer left unclean or, worse, switched off and shut so they sour. None of these is a big charge on its own, but a report listing five of them adds up to real money off your deposit, and that is precisely the situation a full clean against the checklist is meant to stop.
Licensing around Well Hall, and why it matters to you
This is worth getting right, because Greenwich runs two different licensing schemes and Well Hall sits in only one of them. The distinction changes who your landlord answers to.
Greenwich operates a selective licensing scheme, but it is targeted at named wards, and Well Hall is not among them. The council’s scheme covers the Woolwich and Plumstead side of the borough, the wards around Woolwich Riverside, Woolwich Common, Shooters Hill, Plumstead Common and Plumstead and Glyndon, and runs to 2027. You can read the position on the Royal Borough of Greenwich licensing page. If you rent an ordinary house or flat in SE9 around Well Hall, selective licensing almost certainly does not apply to you.
What does apply borough-wide is additional HMO licensing. Greenwich brought that scheme in on 1 January 2024 and it covers the whole borough, Well Hall included, for smaller houses in multiple occupation, the sort shared by three or four people from more than one household who share a kitchen or bathroom. So a shared house on the Progress Estate or off Well Hall Road can need a licence even though the same address falls outside selective licensing. If you are not sure which bracket your tenancy is in, ask the agent before you move out, because licensing can affect how a deposit dispute is handled.
The wider law is shifting too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent in October 2025 and is changing the ground rules of private renting, including how tenancies end. None of it removes the basic deposit principle: the property has to come back at the check-in standard, and cleaning is judged against that. If anything it makes the check-in inventory more important, not less.
How the housing here changes the job
Well Hall is not one kind of house, and the clean changes with the street. It helps to know which sort you are handing back.
The Progress Estate cottages are the signature. Built for Arsenal workers in 1915 on arts-and-crafts principles, they have the steep roofs, casement windows and timbered detail that make the conservation area look like it grew rather than got planned. Inside they tend to keep period features, and those features are where the cleaning time goes. The leaded windows alone take three times as long as a modern pane, because the reveals and the lead want doing by hand.
Around the estate and up the hill towards Eltham Palace, that medieval great hall with the 1930s Art Deco mansion the Courtaulds bolted onto it, you get Edwardian and interwar houses, bigger and often with original ranges, deep bay windows and tiled hallways. The bay reveals and the tiled floors are the usual deduction points there. Closer to the moated grounds of Well Hall Pleasaunce, where the Tudor Barn and the old moat survive and Edith Nesbit once lived and wrote, the housing is a comfortable mix that rewards a clean done slowly.
Then there are the converted flats and the newer blocks near Eltham station. These clean faster, fewer mouldings, less leaded glass, but the bathrooms and kitchens still need the full treatment because that is where every clerk looks first. We bring the same checklist whatever the building. The difference is how long it takes, which is exactly why we do not charge by the hour.
There is a transport angle worth a line, because it affects how we book. Eltham station sits in the Well Hall area on the Bexleyheath line, running into Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Victoria, with the bus interchange right outside on Well Hall Road feeding Eltham High Street. Moving vans and parking around the station and the estate roads can be tight on a weekday, so we tend to suggest a slot that does not clash with the school run. The estate roads were laid out in 1915 for far fewer cars than they hold now, and a removals lorry parked across a narrow stretch by one of the greens will block a neighbour in within minutes.
Where we work around Well Hall
Well Hall does not sit on its own. It is the western end of Eltham, hard up against the boundary with Kidbrooke and a short hop from Blackheath, and we run cleans across all of it on the same week. Knowing the neighbouring areas matters, because tenants here often move sideways rather than away, taking a bigger place one stop along when the family grows.
Straight east is the rest of end of tenancy cleaning in Eltham, the High Street, Roper Street, the streets running up to the Palace, where the housing is much the same mix of period terraces and the odd purpose-built block. The clean is the same job there, judged the same way.
North-west, towards end of tenancy cleaning in Kidbrooke, the picture flips. Kidbrooke Village is mostly new-build, glass and engineered flooring, which cleans faster but gets inspected by the same managing agents to the same fussy standard, so nobody should assume a new flat is an easy hand-back. We work both ends of that spectrum in a single day without changing the checklist.
Then there is end of tenancy cleaning in Blackheath, a short run north, where the Georgian and Victorian houses around the heath are grander and the inventories longer. The point of saying all this is simple: wherever you are moving inside this corner of Greenwich, the price is by size, the standard is the inventory, and the same team covers it. We do not subcontract the next area over to someone we have never met.
Most of our SE9 rounds, though, are the houses right here, on and around the Progress Estate. That is the work we know best.
Booking, access and the day itself
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected], tell us the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and roughly when you are moving, and we give you a fixed price on the spot. No survey visit, no hedged estimate. We work seven days a week, weekends included, which matters when most tenancies end on a Friday or a Saturday.
A few things make the day go smoothly. The property needs to be empty, or close to it. Our team cannot deep clean around a stack of boxes, and a half-packed room is a half-cleaned room. There has to be working electricity and running hot water on the day, because the machines and the cleaning both need them. If the utilities are already cut off, tell us in advance and we will sort the timing.
Leave us access and the keys, and you do not need to be there. Plenty of our Well Hall clients hand over a key and go and deal with the new place. We let ourselves in, work through the checklist, and lock up after. If the agent is doing the check-out the same afternoon, tell us the time when you book and we will work back from it so the property is ready and aired before the clerk arrives.
Then the guarantee. If the inventory clerk or the agent challenges our work, we return and put it right free, within our 48-hour re-clean guarantee. You tell us what was flagged, we come back inside three days, no charge and no argument. That promise is why our pass rate sits where it does, and why so many Eltham agents are comfortable seeing our name on a check-out.
If the inventory clerk or the agent challenges our work, we return and put it right free, within our 48-hour re-clean guarantee.
The extras people near Well Hall Road add
An end-of-tenancy clean covers the property to the inventory standard. Some jobs sit alongside it and get booked at the same time, usually because the check-in report listed them separately or because the tenancy had pets or carpets that took a beating.
Carpets are the common one. If your check-in noted professionally cleaned carpets, you need them cleaned again on the way out, and a hoover will not satisfy a clerk who has the original receipt. We hot-water extract: hot water and solution driven into the pile, then pulled back out with the dirt. Pricing is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bedroom property done together. The carpet cleaning service page has the detail if you want it.
Ovens are the other. Many tenants add a dedicated oven cleaning even when it is part of the end-of-tenancy clean, simply because the oven is the single most flagged appliance in the borough. As a standalone job it is £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double and £114 for a range, with the door taken apart and the removable parts cleaned separately so the carbon actually comes off.
Upholstery and exterior windows round it out. Sofas and mattresses get the same hot-water extraction as carpets. Exterior glass on a house we clean with water-fed poles and purified water, which is the job to add if the report wants the outside of the windows done as well as the inside. Tell us what the inventory says and we will quote the lot in one go.
End of tenancy versus a deep clean
People mix these up on the phone, so it is worth being plain about the difference. They are not the same service and they are not priced the same way.
An end-of-tenancy clean is aimed at one thing: getting the property back to the check-in standard so your deposit comes back. It is measured against the inventory, it follows the agent-approved checklist, and it carries the re-clean guarantee. It is the job you book when you are moving out.
A deep clean is for a property you are staying in, or a place you have just moved into and want reset. There is no inventory to match and no clerk to satisfy, so it is shaped around what you actually want done rather than a report. Useful when you take on a tired Progress Estate house and want it properly clean before you unpack, less useful as a check-out clean because it is not built to pass an inspection.
If you are leaving an SE9 tenancy, you want the end-of-tenancy clean. If you have just arrived in one and the previous tenant did the bare minimum, the deep clean is the one. When you ring, say which situation you are in and we will point you at the right one rather than the dearer one.
- Check-in inventory
- The dated, usually photographed record of the property’s condition at the start of your tenancy. It is the benchmark your check-out clean is judged against.
- Fair wear and tear
- The ordinary deterioration from normal living that a landlord cannot charge you for. Cleaning neglect, grease and scale are not wear and tear.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme licensing ordinary private lets in named wards. Greenwich runs one, but it does not cover Well Hall, as the council licensing page shows.
- Additional HMO licensing
- A separate scheme for smaller shared houses. Greenwich’s runs borough-wide from 2024, so it can apply to a shared house in Well Hall.
- 48-hour re-clean guarantee
- If the clerk or agent challenges our work, we come back and redo the flagged items free within three days.
Questions Well Hall tenants and landlords ask
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Well Hall?
It depends on size, not on hours. A studio is £156, a one-bedroom £207, two bedrooms £243, three bedrooms £339 and four bedrooms £425. The price includes all supplies, the machines and a full clean against our checklist.
Will the clean actually get my deposit back?
The cleaning part of it, yes, for the most part. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits. Cleaning is only one heading on a check-out report, so damage or unpaid rent is separate, but a clean against the inventory standard removes the cleaning argument.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or letting agent challenges our clean, we return and redo the flagged items free of charge within 48 hours. You report what was raised and we come back inside three days, no extra cost.
Do you cover the Progress Estate and the older houses around Well Hall Road?
Yes, and those are most of our work in SE9. The 1915 arts-and-crafts cottages and the Edwardian and interwar houses nearby carry period detail that needs a careful clean, which is exactly what the checklist is built for.
Is my Well Hall rental covered by selective licensing?
Almost certainly not. Greenwich’s selective licensing scheme covers named wards on the Woolwich and Plumstead side, and Well Hall is not among them. Borough-wide additional HMO licensing can apply to shared houses here, so check with your agent if your tenancy is a house share.
Do you charge by the hour?
Not for end of tenancy. That is a fixed price by property size, and the team stays as long as the property needs. By-the-hour cleaning at £30 per cleaner per hour is available for part-jobs if you would rather book that way.
Is carpet cleaning included or extra?
Hoovering carpets is part of the standard clean. Hot-water extraction is a separate service, at £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room or £115 for a whole two-bedroom property, and you should add it if your check-in inventory recorded professionally cleaned carpets.
Are the windows done?
Interior glass is part of the end-of-tenancy clean, leaded casements included. Exterior glass on a house is a separate job done with water-fed poles, so tell us if the inventory wants the outside cleaned too.
Do I need to be there on the day?
No. Most clients leave a key and get on with their move. We let ourselves in, work through the checklist and lock up afterwards.
Does the property have to be empty?
As good as. We cannot deep clean around furniture and boxes, so the place should be cleared, with working electricity and running hot water on the day. If utilities are off, tell us in advance so we can plan the timing.
Can you clean at the weekend?
Yes. We work seven days a week, weekends included, which suits the Friday and Saturday move-out dates most tenancies run on.
How far in advance should I book?
The sooner the better, especially at month-end when moves cluster. A few days’ notice usually secures a slot, but a busy Saturday in SE9 can fill up, so ring early if your date is fixed.
What if I have already cleaned myself?
You can still lose deposit money if your standard does not match the check-in report, which is the benchmark a clerk uses. A professional clean with a receipt is evidence you can put in front of a deposit scheme if there is a dispute.
How do I get a quote?
Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and your moving date. We give you a fixed price straight away, with no survey visit needed.