Two Wimbledons, one checklist
Walk down Wimbledon Hill Road and you pass two rentals that have almost nothing in common. Near the top, by the Common, sits a six-bedroom period villa off Parkside with a wine cellar and a third-floor box room nobody has dusted since the Wombles were on television. Near the bottom, behind The Broadway, sits a one-bed in a new block over the tram tracks, handed over by a relocating analyst who works fifteen minutes from Waterloo. Both tenancies end on the same Friday. Both deposits hang on the same inventory check. We clean both, and we price them by the number of rooms, not the postcode.
That split runs through everything about moving out of SW19. Wimbledon Village, up the hill, is the old medieval settlement: period houses with big gardens, boutiques and pubs along the High Street, Cannizaro Park tucked behind it. The town centre, down by the 1838 railway, is The Broadway, the Centre Court shopping centre, the New Wimbledon Theatre, and a thickening band of new flats around the station. A clean that satisfies a Village landlord and a clean that satisfies a corporate-let agent on Worple Road are aimed at the same standard, but they meet very different rooms to get there.
What the inventory clerk actually marks
Most deductions are avoidable. The deposit fight is almost never about the obvious stuff. Tenants hoover, wipe the worktops, take the bins out, and assume that is the job done. The inventory clerk arrives with the check-in report from the day you moved in and reads the flat against it line by line. They open the oven. They tip the bathroom extractor fan towards the light. They run a finger along the top edge of a door. Deductions get written where the report says “clean” and the clerk now sees grease, dust, or scale.
We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist that mirrors that report, point for point. It exists because we got tired of guessing which line a particular clerk would pick on, so we wrote down every line they pick on. Skirting boards behind the bed. The seal around the shower tray. Limescale on the kettle and the shower glass, which is brutal in this part of London because the water off the Surrey side is hard. The inside of the kitchen drawers, where crumbs collect and never get touched. The clerk has seen a thousand “spotless” flats; the checklist is how we beat the average one.
The traps differ by room, and most of them are predictable once you have cleaned a few hundred move-outs. In kitchens it is the extractor filter, the gap down the side of the oven housing, and the grease film on the wall tiles above the hob that a quick wipe never lifts. In bathrooms it is the grout, the underside of the toilet rim, and the silicone where mould has crept in. In bedrooms it is the wardrobe interiors and the carpet edge against the skirting. None of these are hard once you know to do them. The problem is that a moving tenant, exhausted and three days from the handover, never has the time or the kit to do all fifty-seven, which is precisely why a deduction lands.
Our first-time pass rate sits at 97%. That means in roughly nineteen out of twenty Wimbledon jobs the inventory check signs off with no cleaning re-visit, and the deposit conversation moves on to whatever else the tenant did to the place. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across south west London, several of them with offices on The Broadway and around the Village, and they keep using us because their clerks stop flagging our work.
That agent relationship matters more than it looks. A letting agent who manages a property on behalf of a landlord is the one who books the inventory check, and a good agent would rather a clean passes first time than chase a tenant for a re-clean after the keys are back. When an agent recommends us to a tenant who is moving out, it is because we make their job easier, not because we pay for the privilege. The same goes the other way: a tenant who books us directly, without the agent involved, still gets the clean built to the standard that agent’s clerk will apply, because we already know what they check.
If a clerk or agent does challenge the work, you get a free re-clean. Our 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we come back inside three days, put right whatever was flagged, and you pay nothing for the return trip. Over the years that approach has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have been swallowed by cleaning deductions. The guarantee is not a marketing line. It is the reason agents trust us with a key and a move-out date.
The clerk has seen a thousand “spotless” flats; the checklist is how we beat the average one.
The Championships fortnight clean
For two weeks every summer Wimbledon stops being a suburb and becomes a venue. The Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis Club on Church Road run from 29 June to 12 July in 2026, and more than half a million people come through SW19 for it. A lot of locals leave. Families on the streets around the grounds, off Church Road and up towards the Village, let their houses out for the fortnight at rates that pay for a kitchen or a term of school fees, then take the cash and go on holiday while strangers watch tennis from their spare room.
Nowhere else in Merton works like this.
That short-let surge creates a cleaning pattern you do not get anywhere else in the borough. A house gets handed to a letting agent in late June spotless, lived in hard by a corporate party or a visiting broadcaster for two weeks, and handed back in mid-July needing a proper reset before the owners return or the next tenant moves in. We do a fair few of these post-Championships deep cleans, and they are their own animal: wine rings on a dining table that is normally off-limits, a guest bathroom run into the ground, a kitchen used by people who did not have to clean it.
The same fortnight scrambles ordinary end of tenancy moves. If your tenancy ends in late June or early July and your road is anywhere near the grounds, the parking is gone, the through-traffic is solid, and every man with a van in the area is booked. We plan around it. Book a Wimbledon move-out clean for the fortnight early and we will hold a morning slot before the crowds build, because turning up to a job on Church Road at three in the afternoon during the second week is a fool’s errand.
There is a quieter knock-on effect too. A house that has been let to tennis visitors for two weeks often comes back to the owner needing more than a tidy, and if the owner is then selling or re-letting, that reset becomes a full end of tenancy clean in all but name. We have cleaned places off Burghley Road and around the Village where a fortnight of corporate hospitality left the kind of marks a normal year of living never would: a hob used hard by caterers, glassware rings on furniture that usually lives under dust sheets, a downstairs loo that took the brunt of garden-party traffic. The tennis is good money for residents, but the property always pays for it afterwards, and that is the clean we get called for.
Village houses versus town centre flats
The housing splits cleanly between the hill and the station, and the clean changes with it. Up in the Village you get large Victorian and Edwardian houses, period conversions, and the odd detached pile with a garden backing onto the Common. Down by The Broadway and out toward Worple Road you get mansion blocks, terraces cut into flats, and new-build flats thrown up over the last decade near the tram and the station.
A Village house is a big job because there is simply more of it. More square footage, more sash windows with grimy runners, more original cornicing holding dust, more bathrooms, a kitchen that has usually been extended into a side return with a run of glass nobody has cleaned properly. The gardens are not our job, but the conservatory and the boot room often are. These are the SW19 four and five-bedroom cleans that take a team the better part of a day.
A town-centre flat is a tighter, faster job with its own traps. New-builds look easy and are not. The grouting in a wet room marks fast, the integrated appliances hide grease behind a fascia, and the underfloor heating bakes dust into skirting you would not think to check. The relocation flats around the station turn over constantly, often furnished, often let through a corporate agent who wants the inventory squeaky because the next tenant is already lined up. Speed matters there. So does getting the oven right, because a built-in oven in a small kitchen is the single most common deduction we see.
The mansion blocks are their own category again. There are good Edwardian and inter-war blocks around the town centre and up toward the Ridgway, and a flat in one of those tends to have high ceilings, deep cornicing, big sash windows, and a kitchen that has been refitted at some point but never properly cleaned behind. The runners on those windows collect decades of grime, and a clerk in a period block always checks them. We carry the kit for it, because trying to do a tall sash window with a damp cloth and good intentions is how you lose an afternoon.
Wherever the flat sits, the same hard-water problem follows. Scale builds on taps, glass, and the kettle faster here than a lot of London, and a clerk will write it up every time. We deal with it as a matter of course. We also cover the streets around the core, so if your move is over in Wimbledon Park by the lake and the golf course, or down the hill in South Wimbledon near the Northern line, the same team and the same checklist apply.
New-builds look easy and are not.
What the clean covers and what it costs
The end of tenancy clean is the full empty-property job, not a tidy. It is meant to hand the flat back at the standard the check-in report recorded, so the carpets get done, the kitchen gets stripped, the bathroom descaled, and every room cleaned top to bottom with the property empty of your things. We ask for two simple things before we arrive: the utilities on, so we have hot water and power, and the fridge-freezer defrosted, because we clean appliances, not ice.
Prices go by the size of the property, which keeps it honest. A studio is £156. A one-bedroom flat is £207, a two-bedroom £243, a three-bedroom £339, and a four-bedroom house £425. The big Village houses sit at the top of that and sometimes above it once you count the extra bathrooms and reception rooms, and we quote those after a quick look or a proper description. If you would rather buy time than a fixed package, we also work by the hour at £30 per cleaner.
Carpets are where a lot of deposits quietly leak, so we price them plainly. A bedroom carpet is £36, a living-room carpet £43, and a whole two-bed flat done in one go is £115. We use hot-water extraction, not a wet-and-hope machine, which matters on the pale wool carpets you find in the Village houses. You can book carpet cleaning on its own or fold it into the end of tenancy job.
The oven is the other reliable deduction, and we treat it as a separate trade because it is one. A single oven is £77, a double £110, and a range £114, degreased properly with the racks and the door glass done. If the kitchen is the only thing you are worried about, oven cleaning can be booked alone, though most Wimbledon tenants on a move-out take it as part of the package. None of these prices are inflated for the Village postcode. We charge by the rooms in front of us.
People ask what is and is not in the headline price, so to be plain about it. The end of tenancy clean covers the full property: kitchen units inside and out, the hob and extractor, the bathroom and its tiling descaled, all the floors, the insides of windows, skirting, switches, doors and frames, and the carpets where carpet cleaning is booked. It does not cover the garden, the outside of the windows above ground level, or moving furniture you have left behind, and it cannot put right actual damage like a cracked tile or a burn in a worktop. Those are repair jobs, not cleaning, and a clerk will log them separately.
End of tenancy versus a normal clean
This is not the clean you have done every fortnight. A regular domestic clean keeps a home you are living in on top of things: surfaces, floors, a bathroom, a kitchen, the visible stuff. It assumes furniture in place and people coming back that evening. The end of tenancy clean assumes the opposite, an empty shell handed to a stranger with a checklist, and it goes everywhere the regular clean skips because nobody normally looks there.
The difference shows in the corners. In a lived-in flat nobody pulls the oven out, lifts the hob, or descales the shower screen down to clear glass every week, so over a two or three-year tenancy that grime sets hard. End of tenancy work is largely about undoing that build-up: the baked carbon on an oven floor, the soap and scale welded to a wet-room screen, the dust that has cemented itself to the top of a Village kitchen’s tall units. A deep clean tackles the same build-up for someone who is staying put and simply wants the place reset, which is a useful job, but it carries no inventory and no deposit riding on it. The end of tenancy version is the deep clean plus the pressure of a clerk checking it against a report.
Knowing which one you need saves money. If you are moving out, you want the end of tenancy clean, full stop, because that is the only one matched to the check-in inventory. If you are staying and the place has just got on top of you, a deep clean or a one-off is plenty and cheaper. We get calls from Wimbledon tenants who book a regular clean to save a few pounds before a move-out, watch it fail the inventory, and pay us twice. The right clean first time is the cheap option.
Merton licensing and why it touches your move
Wimbledon sits in the London Borough of Merton, and Merton’s landlord-licensing rules are mid-change, which is worth understanding if you rent here or are about to. Three layers exist. Mandatory HMO licensing applies across the whole borough to any large house in multiple occupation let to five or more people forming more than one household. On top of that, Merton runs additional and selective licensing schemes that started on 24 September 2023 and run for five years.
Here is the part that surprises people. Those 2023 additional and selective schemes do not cover the Wimbledon wards. Per Merton’s own licensing pages, additional HMO licensing applies in just seven wards: Colliers Wood, Cricket Green, Figge’s Marsh, Graveney, Lavender Fields, Longthornton and Pollards Hill. Selective licensing is narrower still, covering Figge’s Marsh, Graveney, Longthornton and Pollards Hill. Hillside, Village, Abbey, Wimbledon Town and Wimbledon Park are not on either list, so a small three or four-person shared house up the hill has not, until now, needed one of those licences.
That is changing borough-wide. In February 2026 Merton’s Cabinet agreed to widen the schemes across the whole borough, and an immediate Article 4 direction took effect on 24 March 2026 removing the automatic right to turn family homes into small HMOs without planning permission. The practical upshot for a Wimbledon move is small but real: if your landlord is converting or re-letting a house as a shared HMO, the paperwork they need is growing, and a clean inventory at the end of your tenancy is one less thing for them to argue about while they sort the rest out.
For a sharer moving out of a Village house split between four or five young professionals, which is a common set-up around here, the licence position has a knock-on effect worth knowing. A licensed HMO carries conditions the landlord has to meet, and the property is on the council’s radar in a way an ordinary let is not. When that house changes hands at the end of a tenancy, both sides tend to be a bit more careful about the inventory, because there is a paper trail. A clean that passes the check first time keeps the whole thing tidy, and keeps your share of the deposit out of the argument.
Licensing is the landlord’s problem, not yours, but it shapes the market you are renting in. The bigger lever over your deposit is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which reworked assured tenancies and tightened how landlords behave at the end of a let. Your deposit itself still has to sit in one of the three government-backed tenancy deposit schemes within 30 days, and you can take any unfair cleaning deduction to that scheme’s free dispute service. Shelter’s guidance is clear that a landlord cannot charge you for normal wear and tear, only for cleaning the property was not left in.
Booking around the SW19 timetable
Wimbledon station is one of the busiest interchanges in south London, and that cuts both ways for a move. You have got the District line terminus, Thameslink, South Western Railway into Waterloo in under twenty minutes, and the Tramlink terminus running out to Croydon. South Wimbledon on the Northern line is a short walk down the hill. Getting a team here is never the problem. Getting a van parked outside a Village house on a narrow road can be, and during the tennis it is worse.
Access is half the job here. The geography of the place sets the working day. A job up by the Common, near the Windmill end, means narrow lanes, residents’ parking, and a long carry from wherever the van lands. A job by the station means loading bays, lifts that need booking, and bin stores three floors down. We have learned the difference the hard way, so when you book we ask the practical questions: which floor, is there a lift, is there anywhere to stop, is the road permit-only. A clean on Arthur Road toward the park is a different morning from a clean on The Broadway, and we would rather know before we arrive than work it out on the doorstep.
So we book around the area as much as the calendar. Tell us where the property actually is, because a flat above The Broadway with loading restrictions is a different access job from a detached house off Parkside with a drive. Tell us if your move-out lands in the Championships fortnight, and we will get you an early slot. Most jobs we can turn around with a day or two’s notice, but the last Friday of the month and the whole of early July fill up fast.
On the day, the property needs to be empty, the utilities on, and the fridge defrosted. We bring everything else, including the hard-water kit you need around here. When the inventory clerk comes, our work is checked against the same report we cleaned to, and if anything is flagged we are back inside the 48-hour re-clean window to fix it. To book, or to get a quote on a specific Wimbledon property, call us on 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected]. We are a south west London firm, based at 255 Upper Richmond Road West in SW14, and Wimbledon is on our doorstep.
We cover the whole area around the hill and the station too. Beyond Wimbledon proper we clean in Raynes Park out toward SW20, Merton Park by the tram, Colliers Wood down the Northern line, and Southfields on the Putney side near the grounds.
Words people use at checkout
Move-out paperwork is full of terms that mean money. Here are the ones that matter most when your deposit is on the line.
- Check-in inventory
- The report made when you moved in, with photos and a condition note for every room. The end of tenancy clean is judged against this document, not against a clerk’s mood, so the cleaner is effectively cleaning to match it.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full clean of an empty property to hand it back at the move-in standard. Different from a regular clean, which keeps a lived-in home ticking over, and from a one-off deep clean, which tackles built-up grime without the inventory pressure.
- Fair wear and tear
- The ordinary ageing a landlord cannot charge you for: a slightly worn carpet, a faded wall. A dirty oven or a scaled shower is not wear and tear, it is cleaning, and that is deductible. Shelter spells out the line.
- Deposit protection scheme
- One of three government-backed schemes your deposit must sit in within 30 days of you paying it. Each runs a free dispute service if you and the landlord cannot agree on deductions.
- HMO licence
- A licence a landlord needs to let a house in multiple occupation. In Merton, large HMOs need one borough-wide; smaller ones now face planning controls under the March 2026 Article 4 direction.
Questions Wimbledon tenants ask
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Wimbledon?
Prices go by property size: £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bedroom flat, £243 for two bedrooms, £339 for three, and £425 for a four-bedroom house. Large Village houses with extra bathrooms can sit above the four-bed price, quoted after a quick look. We do not add a premium for the SW19 postcode.
Do you charge more for houses in Wimbledon Village?
No. We price by the number of rooms in front of us, not by the address. A Village house costs more than a town-centre flat only because it is bigger, with more bathrooms, more windows and more floor to clean, not because of where it sits on the hill.
Can you clean during the Wimbledon Championships fortnight?
Yes, and we plan for it. The tennis runs from 29 June to 12 July in 2026, and roads near the All England Club get choked. Book early and we will hold a morning slot before the crowds build, whether it is a normal move-out or a post-let reset after a short rental.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or letting agent flags our work, we come back within 48 hours, put right whatever was raised, and you pay nothing for the return visit. It is why agents across Merton are comfortable handing us a key and a deadline.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
No. Most tenants hand over a key or arrange access through the agent. The property needs to be empty of your belongings, the utilities on for hot water and power, and the fridge-freezer defrosted before we start.
Is carpet cleaning included or extra?
It is a separate line so you only pay for what you need. A bedroom carpet is £36, a living room £43, and a whole two-bed flat £115, done with hot-water extraction. On a move-out most people add it because worn or stained carpets are a common deduction.
How far in advance should I book?
A day or two’s notice is usually enough, but the last Friday of the month and the whole of early July fill quickly. If your tenancy ends during the Championships, book as far ahead as you can.
What is your first-time pass rate?
97%. In about nineteen out of twenty jobs the inventory check signs off with no cleaning re-visit. The 57-point agent-approved checklist is built to match the check-in report, which is what keeps that number high.
Does the oven really need separate cleaning?
A built-in oven in a small flat is the single most common deduction we see, so yes, it earns its own treatment. A single oven is £77, a double £110, and a range £114, with the racks and door glass degreased properly.
Do you cover areas around Wimbledon as well?
Yes. We clean across Merton, including Wimbledon Park, South Wimbledon, Raynes Park, Merton Park, Colliers Wood and Southfields, with the same team and the same checklist on every job.
Will hard water marks count against my deposit?
They can. Scale on taps, shower glass and the kettle is written up as cleaning, not wear and tear, and the water around Wimbledon is hard. We descale all of it as standard so the clerk has nothing to flag.
Do I need an HMO licence to rent in Wimbledon?
That is the landlord’s responsibility, not the tenant’s. Large HMOs need a licence borough-wide in Merton; smaller shared houses in the Wimbledon wards now face planning controls under the Article 4 direction that took effect on 24 March 2026.
What happens if my deposit deduction seems unfair?
Your deposit sits in a government-backed protection scheme, and each scheme runs a free dispute service. If a cleaning deduction looks wrong, you can raise it there, and a professional end of tenancy clean with a pass gives you strong evidence the property was left clean.