The inventory clerk on the Downham estate opens the oven door, then asks you to slide the freestanding cooker out from between the units, because the narrow grease channels down each side of it are where a 1930s scullery kitchen quietly loses a deposit. That is the standard an end of tenancy clean here has to clear: not “tidy”, but a hand-back matched line for line to the check-in report, on a 57-point agent-approved checklist, at £30 per hour per cleaner, behind a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a fixed price in a few minutes.
Last updated June 2026. We cover Whitefoot, the Downham estate and the lanes around Whitefoot Lane across SE6 and the BR1 edge to the south. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Lewisham.
How the clean and the hand-back actually work
Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody explains it, and it is the whole game. When you moved into your Downham house, an inventory clerk walked it and wrote a check-in report: every surface described, usually photographed, the kitchen and bathroom noted as clean. At check-out a clerk walks the same house and compares it to that report, line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, can be charged against your deposit. You are not being marked against a vague idea of clean. You are being marked against a document, and the clean has to answer it.
So we clean to the document, not to the eye. Every booking runs on a 57-point agent-approved checklist built over a decade of local check-outs, and the order of it is deliberate: we do the things a clerk opens first, first. The cooker comes out. The window frames get worked. The bathroom scale comes off the glass rather than getting smeared around it. Then we photograph the house, room by room, before we leave, so you finish the day holding dated evidence rather than hoping the clerk agrees with you.
Then the guarantee sits behind it. If the clerk flags a cleaning point we covered, tell us inside 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no further cost, provided the house is still empty and nobody has moved in. On this estate a callback is almost always a single cooker channel or a window reveal, not a whole room, because the misses cluster in the same few places every time. That is why our 97% first-time pass rate holds on housing stock this old, and it is why letting agents keep us on their books: a clean built around the report is a clean the report cannot easily argue with.
We clean to the document, not to the eye.
The 57 things, in the order a Downham clerk checks them
The full checklist comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it, room by room, weighted the way an estate house actually gets inspected.
The kitchen, where most of these deposits are won or lost
A Downham scullery rarely has room for a range, so most kitchens here run a freestanding 60cm cooker wedged between units. We pull it out and clean both sides, the wall behind and the floor under it, then strip the oven itself: cavity, racks in a soaking tank, door glass split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, fan, element and seals. The hob, burners and control knobs come off and get washed. The extractor hood is degreased inside and out and the filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard, inside and out, including the awkward corner units, with the kickboards done along the bottom. Sink, taps and drainer descaled, because the water here never gives that a miss. Tiles and grout scrubbed. Then the floor, pulled back where it lifts, into the corners and along the run of units where a small kitchen hides the worst of it.
The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong
Hard-water scale comes off the shower screen, taps, tiles and any enclosure first, worked off with a proper descaler rather than wiped, because a sponge does nothing to a chalk bloom in this water. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is plainly past saving so you are not billed for wear that was already there at check-in. Then the toilet, done inside, under the rim, around the base and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk. Shower screen both sides and the sealant bead. Mirror and any cabinet, cleared and polished. Extractor vent dusted. Floor washed to the edges and behind the loo.
Bedrooms, living rooms and the rest
Skirtings, picture rails and any original joinery dusted by hand, because clerks on this estate photograph the older woodwork close-up against the check-in shots. The airing cupboard and every built-in cupboard cleared and wiped, a spot the clerk almost always opens on a Downham house. Carpets vacuumed through, hard floors washed, marks on paintwork addressed where they will lift rather than scrubbed into a worse state. Interior glass and the metal window frames and reveals cleaned, condensation residue dealt with. Switches, sockets and radiators done. Light fittings and shades dusted, cobwebs out of the ceiling lines, the stairs and hallway end to end. The house is left to match the check-in schedule, not to look pleasant. Tidy is not the target. Inventory-clean is.
- Oven door, then the cooker slid out to inspect both sides and the wall behind
- Window frames and reveals, especially the original metal casements, for grime and condensation residue
- Bathroom screen, taps and tiles, checked for hard-water scale
- The airing cupboard and any built-in storage, opened and looked into properly
- Skirtings, picture rails and original joinery, photographed against the check-in pictures
- Carpet edges and the stairs, where wear on an older house shows first
- Kitchen cupboard interiors, kickboards and the floor under the units
We work in that order on purpose. If a clean ever misses, it tends to be a frame or a cooker channel, which is exactly what the 48-hour re-clean guarantee is there to catch.
Why a cottage-estate house is its own kind of job
Whitefoot Lane was a road before any of the houses around it existed. The bulk of the Downham estate went up between 1924 and 1930, an LCC cottage estate built to George Topham Forrest’s plans, about 7,000 homes on 522 acres for families cleared out of the Rotherhithe, Deptford and Bermondsey slums. King George V opened one of the first completed houses in 1927. A later run of just over a thousand houses, sometimes called North Downham, was added off Whitefoot Lane in 1937 by the builders Higgs and Hill. So the thing you are handing back is usually a house pushing a hundred years old: a Right-to-Buy ex-council terrace or semi, now privately let, with a garden, and an inventory clerk who knows exactly which fittings date from the 1920s.
That age changes the clean. The kitchens are small. The original metal-framed casement windows are still in a lot of these houses, and the putty lines, the reveals and the corners of the panes hold grime and condensation residue that a quick wipe slides straight past. The joinery is original on many of them, so the skirtings and picture rails get photographed close-up. The roads run in long, consistent terraces, which means a clerk who has worked one Valeswood Road house knows the layout of the next one before the front door opens. That consistency cuts both ways. It is why the schedules here are detailed, and it is why we already know the stock.
What hard Thames water leaves on a Downham bathroom
Whitefoot straddles SE6 and the BR1 edge to the south, and the whole patch runs on hard Thames Water supply drawn through London’s chalk. Across the Thames Water region the water is classed as very hard, commonly measured between roughly 280 and 300 parts per million of calcium carbonate, and you can read the hardness for your own postcode on Thames Water’s hard-water page. In daily life a cloudy scale film builds on shower screens, around tap bases and across tiles faster than tenants expect, and on a long Downham tenancy that bloom is often the single biggest reason a clerk marks the bathroom down.
It cannot be wiped off. It has to be broken down with the right descaler and worked, which takes time, so we allow time for it rather than leaving it to the last twenty minutes. The same scale sits on the kitchen taps and around the sink, and the same approach deals with it. None of that is dramatic. All of it is on the schedule, and a smeared screen reads to a clerk as a screen nobody touched.
A smeared shower screen reads to a clerk as a screen nobody touched.
Lewisham licensing, and why your landlord now cares more
Whitefoot is one of the wards inside Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme. The council groups its wards into three designations, and Whitefoot sits in the third one alongside Bellingham, Downham, Forest Hill and Grove Park. The scheme went live on 1 July 2024 and runs to 30 June 2029, and within those wards almost every privately rented house occupied by a single household or by two unrelated sharers needs a selective licence unless it is already licensed as a House in Multiple Occupation. That sits on top of the borough-wide additional HMO scheme, which came into force on 5 April 2022 and runs to 4 April 2027. Lewisham’s own pages can be slow to load and sometimes block automated traffic, so it is worth phoning the council if you need the licence position on a specific address confirmed.
This matters to you as a departing tenant for a plain reason. A licensed landlord has paid a fee per property and is held to minimum standards, so the property file matters to them in a way it did not a few years ago. They want the house back in a state that re-lets quickly and cleanly, and they are more willing to argue a deposit deduction over presentation than an informal landlord once was. A clean that closes the inventory off properly is the thing that stops that argument before it starts.
The legal mechanics around your deposit did not soften when the law changed. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026: Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone and existing assured shorthold tenancies have converted to periodic ones, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at most points rather than waiting out a fixed term. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. Your deposit still sits in a protected scheme, the landlord still has to evidence any deduction against the check-in report, and a clean that does not match is still the thing that gets challenged. What changed is timing: shorter notice can mean less runway to get the clean booked, so book earlier than tenants used to. If you want the wider picture on deposits and deductions, Shelter’s guidance sets it out plainly.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document a clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it rather than to a generic idea of clean.
- Selective licence
- The licence most privately let Whitefoot houses now need under Lewisham’s scheme. It does not change the deposit rules, but it does mean your landlord is inspected and fee-paying, so the hand-back state matters more to them.
- Periodic tenancy
- The rolling, no-fixed-end tenancy that existing lets converted to on 1 May 2026. It affects how much notice you give, not the cleaning standard you hand back to.
Whitefoot Lane to the woodland walk: the patch we cover
We work the whole Downham estate and the lanes around it, not a narrow strip. Whitefoot Lane runs along the old northern boundary; Downham Way is the estate’s main spine; Valeswood Road and Glenbow Road sit deep in the cottage-estate terraces. Forster Memorial Park, opened in 1922, anchors the west of the ward, and the Downham Woodland Walk, a surviving tract of ancient woodland shown on maps as far back as 1805, threads between the houses for over a mile from Whitefoot Terrace toward Bromley Road. Hither Green Cemetery marks the eastern edge.
The stations frame the patch rather than sitting in the middle of it. The South Eastern main line runs down the east side between Hither Green and Grove Park; the Catford Loop line runs the west between Bellingham and Beckenham Hill. Bromley Road, the A21, and South End Lane, the A2218, carry the western edge, and the South Circular A205 is a short run north, so reaching jobs across Downham, Catford and toward Bromley is straightforward on a tight check-out timetable. Parking and access vary street to street on this estate, so if a job sits closer to the Bellingham or Grove Park side we will say so when we quote, because it changes how we schedule the van.
Whitefoot is its own place, not central Catford. It is the cottage-estate edge: Grove Park over the railway to the east, Bellingham to the west, and the busier high-street stock around Rushey Green further north toward Catford proper. The houses change as you cross those lines, and so does the clean.
What it costs, and the sum tenants run too late
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio or small flat | 3 to 4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £156 |
| 1-bed house or flat | 4 to 5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £207 |
| 2-bed Downham terrace | 5 to 7 hours, 2 cleaners | From £243 |
| 3-bed estate house or semi | 6 to 8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £339 |
| 4-bed house | 8 to 10 hours, 2 to 3 cleaners | From £425 |
| Carpet add-on | Same visit | From £36 a room |
| Oven add-on, single | Within the visit | From £77 |
Those are full prices for that property size, not a stripped-back rate with extras bolted on after. If you would rather book by the hour for a part-job, that is £30 per cleaner. Carpet cleaning is an add-on at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed, which is the option most Downham tenants take given how much carpet and stair runner a typical estate house holds. Oven add-ons run £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range, though most kitchens here take the single given the scullery size. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household or a kitchen nobody has deep-cleaned in years takes longer, and we say so on the phone rather than after.
Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed Downham clean at £243, set against a deposit that on these houses usually sits north of £1,500, is not really a decision. Most tenants only do that arithmetic after they have cleaned it themselves, failed the check-out, and lost the first round, which is the expensive way to find out. 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 point of the job: money that stays with the tenant.
No deposit games. Just the clean.
Telling one kind of clean from another
People sometimes book the wrong clean for a check-out, so it is worth being clear which is which.
| Type | What it is for | Matched to the inventory? |
|---|---|---|
| End of tenancy | Handing the house back with the deposit on the line | Yes, against the check-in report |
| Deep clean | A heavy reset while you are staying on | No |
| Regular clean | Routine upkeep, weekly or fortnightly | No |
| Domestic clean | Ongoing help around the house | No |
A deep clean makes a house you are keeping feel fresh. An end of tenancy clean is measured line by line against the inventory, and it is the only one of these that decides a deposit. If you are not sure which you need for a Downham let, say so when you call and we will tell you straight rather than sell you the bigger job. We also run carpet cleaning and oven cleaning as standalone visits if a clerk has flagged only one of those and the rest of the house is fine.
A job off Valeswood Road in May
“We are a retired couple, ten years in a two-bed terrace off Valeswood Road, one of the old Downham houses we had bought under Right to Buy and then let out after we moved nearer our daughter. The thing we could not beat was the windows. The house still has the original metal casements, and a decade of condensation had left dark mould lines along every frame and into the reveal corners that we had painted over twice and that always came back. The clerk had photographed each window at check-in. Monster sent two cleaners on the Thursday, two days before the inspection, and they spent most of the visit on exactly that, taking the frames and reveals back to clean paintwork. We got the full deposit back with the windows signed off in the report.”
Maureen and Brian, Valeswood Road, BR1, May 2026
That job is typical of the estate. The challenge is rarely filth. It is age, hard water and original fittings that ordinary cleaning leaves half-done, set against a schedule written by a clerk who has inspected dozens of near-identical Downham houses and knows where to put the torch. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated photographs that went out with the invoice, the part most do-it-yourself check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.
Questions we get asked
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Whitefoot?
A studio or small flat is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. That is the full price for that property size on the Downham estate. If you would rather book by the hour for a part-job, it is £30 per cleaner.
Do you guarantee the clean if the inventory clerk is not happy?
Yes. Every end of tenancy clean carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the clerk flags a cleaning point we covered, tell us within 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no extra cost, as long as the house is still empty and nobody has moved in.
What is your pass rate with letting agents?
We hold a 97% first-time pass rate and have recovered over £1.2m in deposits for tenants. We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist used with 300+ letting agents, so the standard we clean to is the one agents already accept.
Why do the windows matter so much on a Downham house?
Many estate houses here still have their original interwar metal-framed casements. Condensation leaves dark residue along the frames and in the reveal corners that ordinary cleaning misses, and clerks photograph the windows at check-in precisely because the frames are original. We take them back to clean paintwork as a matter of course.
Does the hard water here really affect the inspection?
It does. Whitefoot is on hard Thames Water supply, classed as very hard at roughly 280 to 300 parts per million across the region. Scale builds quickly on shower screens, taps and tiles, and a clerk will mark a bathroom down for it, so we descale those surfaces properly rather than wiping over them.
Do I need to be there when you clean?
No. Most Downham tenants leave a key or arrange access through the letting agent and collect the report afterwards. We can work to the check-out time the agent has set, so the house is finished before the clerk arrives.
How does Lewisham’s selective licensing affect my deposit?
It does not change the deposit rules directly. It does mean your landlord is licensed, inspected and fee-paying, so the property file matters to them and they are more likely to argue presentation at check-out. A clean that closes the inventory off cleanly is what avoids that argument. Whitefoot is one of the wards in the scheme, which runs to 30 June 2029.
Has the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 changed the cleaning standard?
No. The Act, live since 1 May 2026, changed tenancy structure, not deposit mechanics. Your deposit is still protected, deductions still have to be evidenced against the check-in inventory, and a clean that does not match is still what gets challenged. The practical effect is that shorter notice can leave less time to clean, so book early.
Can you do the carpets and the oven on the same visit?
Yes. Carpet cleaning is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed, and estate houses here carry a lot of carpet and stairs, so the whole-area option is usually the sensible one. Oven add-ons are £77 single, £110 double and £114 for a 90cm range. Tell us when you book and it goes in the quote.
What if the kitchen has a range cooker rather than a freestanding one?
Most Downham sculleries are too small for a range and take a freestanding 60cm cooker, which is the single-oven add-on at £77. If your kitchen has a double oven at £110 or a 90cm range at £114, tell us when you book and we price it correctly.
How far ahead should I book?
Two to three days’ notice is usually enough for a Downham property, but check-out season is busy and Saturday slots go first. With shorter notice periods now common since the law changed, the earlier you call, the better your chance of the slot you want before the inspection.
Do you cover the rest of Lewisham as well as Whitefoot?
Yes. We cover Downham, Bellingham, Grove Park, Catford and across the borough, and the wider Lewisham directory is linked at the top of this page.
What does the clean not include?
It does not include clearing your belongings or rubbish; the house needs to be empty so we can reach every surface the inventory covers. It also does not cover exterior windows above ground-floor reach. Everything inside that is on the check-in schedule is covered in the quoted price.
Other Monster Cleaning services in Whitefoot
Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in Whitefoot, oven cleaning in Whitefoot and domestic cleaning in Whitefoot.