Professional cleaning in Lewisham

Since 1 July 2024 most private landlords in Lewisham have needed a selective licence. The council puts the scheme at about 20,000 homes, nearly every private let not already licensed as an HMO, with Telegraph Hill and some Blackheath streets left out. The additional HMO scheme is older, from April 2022. It catches a house of three or four unrelated sharers using one kitchen or bathroom, a purpose-built flat with three or more sharers, and a home where the landlord lives in and has more than two lodgers.

Put together, that is a lot of licensed lets changing hands, many of them shared. In a shared house the kitchen and bathroom take the longest, because several people have used them. A studio starts at £156 for our end of tenancy cleaning and a four-bedroom house at £425, with the sizes in between on that page. A house let room by room, with a second bathroom or a kitchen on each floor, gets its own figure on the call. Landlords can book between tenancies and leave the keys with the agent or in a keysafe.

The town centre is where Lewisham’s newest flats are going up. Next to the stations, Lewisham Gateway’s first phase is complete: a new park, Confluence Place, with 362 private homes round it. Phase two is listed as being built and will add 649 more, among them 119 co-living studios and 424 flats to rent at market rates. In a block like that, let us know whether the cleaner should collect a fob from the concierge, use a keysafe or ring you at the door, and where the car can pull in while the kit comes out. When a furnished flat is between tenants, you can book oven cleaning by itself from £77.

The older streets are different work. St Mary’s conservation area follows the old coaching road that became Lewisham High Street, with late Victorian terraces near the Grade II* church, and in Ladywell the builder Samuel J. Jerrard put up generous houses in the 1880s and 1890s on Vicars Hill, Algernon Road and Algiers Road. Professional cleaning in a house that size means more rooms and more stairs per visit, so book by the hour. Zone B1 is controlled Monday to Saturday, and B2 adds Sunday mornings until 1.30pm.

Flats dominate Deptford. Take the Deptford and Evelyn wards together and flats were home to 82.9 per cent of households in 2021, while 42.6 per cent were council or housing association tenants. The homes range from the Pepys Estate, which opened in July 1966 where the Victualling Yard had been, and the 1930s Crossfield Estate with its nine blocks near the Creek, to flats over the shops on the High Street, in a conservation area that grew up around Henry VIII’s naval dockyard.

Plan around the market. Stalls go up on Deptford High Street and Douglas Way every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 9am until 5.30pm, and on market days no vehicle may drive along the High Street from 6am to 7pm. For a flat over a shop there, book professional cleaning for a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday if you can. Deptford ward’s water is very hard (Thames Water’s New Cross zone averaged 331 mg/l in 2025), so in a deep clean of a bathroom left for a while, much of the time goes on scale: round the base of each tap, along the shower screen and under the toilet rim.

Forest Hill got its railway in 1839, and most of the older housing followed in the sixty years after. Those streets now make up a conservation area of 45 hectares, Lewisham’s fifth largest, where an Article 4 direction guards the architecture; interwar houses on Thorpewood Avenue are inside it too. Next to it, and mostly within Forest Hill ward, Sydenham Park’s later Victorian houses come in all three forms, detached, paired and terraced, built of yellow stock brick under slate.

Nearly half of Forest Hill’s households (49.1 per cent) were owner-occupiers at the census, more than in any other area on this page. For a house you live in, regular domestic cleaning is charged at £23 an hour if the cleaner comes every week and £24 if every other week, and we aim to keep the same cleaner on your home. Lewisham’s zone list has no controlled zone named for Forest Hill; the closest, Honor Oak and Ravensbourne Park, are controlled 9am to 5pm on weekdays. Thames Water’s Norwood and Forest Hill zone averaged 255 mg/l in 2025, among the softer readings in the borough, so professional cleaning here meets less limescale than in New Cross Gate, though the water is still hard.

A larger share of households rent privately in Brockley than anywhere else on this page: 36.0 per cent at the census. The old Brockley ward is named in Lewisham’s selective licensing designation, which lasts until 1 July 2029. Much of the area is the Brockley conservation area, a Victorian suburb that speculative builders started in the 1830s and mostly finished after 1850, with tiled paths, stucco capitals and terracotta, and big front gardens. Brookmill Road, part of Deptford New Town, is on a smaller scale: two-storey houses dating from the 1850s to the 1870s, terraced in compact rows under London roofs.

That much renting means a lot of flats changing hands, and each change needs a move-out clean. A one-bedroom flat starts at £207, two bedrooms at £243, and the oven adds £31. Brockley postcodes sit in Thames Water’s Lewisham North zone, very hard at a 2025 mean of 308 mg/l, and limescale on taps and screens is something inventory clerks check, so professional cleaners allow extra time for the bathroom.