Professional cleaning in Wandsworth

Since 1 July 2025 a landlord letting even to a single household has needed a selective licence in four wards: South Balham, Tooting Broadway, Tooting Bec and Furzedown. A second designation brought in Northcote, East Putney and West Putney on 1 April 2026, running to 31 March 2031. No other ward has selective licensing. Every ward is also inside an additional HMO designation, in force from that same July day in 2025 until 30 June 2030. A selective licence costs less than an additional HMO licence, both are paid in two instalments, and a mandatory HMO licence for three units costs more than either.

Whichever licence a let falls under, the tenancy ends with a check-out. With end of tenancy cleaning a one-bedroom flat starts at £207, a two-bedroom flat at £243 and a four-bedroom house at £425. A single oven adds £31; a double, or a 90cm range, adds £62. If the carpets are cleaned at the same visit, the living room is £36 and each bedroom £29.

Battersea Park is framed along Prince of Wales Drive by a row of mansion blocks, late Victorian and roughly five floors high, facing the Grade II* park. There are seven main blocks, Overstrand Mansions first, and every one was complete by 1902; they have been a conservation area since November 1988. A short way inland, the Shaftesbury Park Estate of 1873 to 1877 is stock brick, Gothic in its detailing and two storeys high, and Peabody manages most of it. Because of an Article 4 direction, a new window or door there, or a coat of paint on an outside wall, needs planning permission.

Seven days a week, from nine in the morning until eight at night, zone B controls Prince of Wales Drive and some of Battersea Park Road, and a car may stay four hours at most there; Battersea Park Road is red route for most of its length. Four hours suits the smallest deep cleaning booking, three hours with two cleaners, each at £26 an hour, plus £30 for the machines and products, charged once. Battersea Park, St Mary’s and Shaftesbury & Queenstown wards are outside selective licensing, so before professional cleaning on a let only shared homes need checking against the HMO scheme.

By the river in Putney, the garden walls do a second job as flood defences. Ruvigny Mansions on the Embankment has its entrances raised behind a rendered wall. At the corner of Festing Road the houses sit level with the street, so the flood wall, brick and concrete, is built across their fronts. Inland, the council designated West Putney a conservation area in 1986 and enlarged it a year later; it starts in the Georgian and Victorian streets of the old town and runs out into an Edwardian suburb built over fields, with six character areas by the council’s count.

A carpeted Edwardian family house is a good fit for carpet and rug cleaning in one visit, with stairs, landings and rugs done room by room by hot water extraction. Rugs are cleaned in place, on the floor; none are taken away. Landlords in East Putney and West Putney wards have needed a selective licence since 1 April 2026; Thamesfield, round the town centre and the riverside, is outside the scheme. Zone A1 covers Putney High Street, controlled 8.30am until 6.30pm, Monday to Saturday, with stays of one or two hours, so for a long job professional cleaners look for a bay nearby with a longer limit.

Du Cane Court on Balham High Road has 676 flats, the smallest studios and the largest four-bedroom penthouses, and when it was built in the 1930s nothing larger had gone up in Europe as a block of flats for private occupation. Alfred Heaver built the streets of the Heaver Estate conservation area, out towards Tooting Bec Common, between about 1890 and 1910: Queen Anne style houses and flats in red brick with carved brickwork, multi-paned windows, cast iron gates and railings and tessellated tile paths. Over a third of Balham households, 34.4 per cent, occupy a flat in a converted or shared house.

The hardest single sample among the Wandsworth zones checked came from Balham: of four 2025 samples in the Balham zone one measured 326 mg/l, in the very hard band, and the mean was 268. Scale returns fast on taps, glass and shower trays, and regular domestic cleaning, from £69 for a 3-hour visit, keeps it from building up. South Balham ward has needed selective licences since July 2025; Balham ward has not. Balham High Road carries red route markings along most of its length, its bays in zones H1 to H3 allow four hours on weekdays (and Saturdays on some stretches), and some blocks on the road are excluded from the CPZ.

Most of Earlsfield’s Victorian terraces date from after April 1884, when the station opened on Garratt Lane. The high street runs between Garratt Lane, Allfarthing Lane and Burntwood Lane, with the River Wandle following roughly the line of Garratt Lane. On the Wandsworth Common side, the SW18 streets known as the Toast Rack are large Victorian semi-detached and detached houses, and 49.4 per cent of households across Wandle and Wandsworth Common wards owned their home in 2021.

Big houses like those are where house cleaning by the hour comes in, floor by floor, with the hours set by the number of rooms and bathrooms. Parking needs some care. Sub-zones L1 and L2 have four-hour bays, controlled on weekdays between half past nine and half past four, and in part of L2 only permit holders may park from half past ten to half past eleven. On Garratt Lane the bays are controlled from 10am to 4pm, Monday to Saturday, mostly with a one hour limit, and most of them are pay and display bays where permits are not valid. Neither ward is in selective licensing, so for professional cleaning between lets only HMO licensing is relevant.

Flats house 98.5 per cent of Nine Elms households, 97.6 per cent in purpose-built blocks; at 58.4 per cent, private renting is higher than in any of the other eight areas here. Another 7.6 per cent were in shared ownership in 2021. Along the river, Chelsea Bridge Wharf and Embassy Gardens are among the developments, with as many as 1,982 homes planned, and there are two large council estates, Carey Gardens and the Savona. Battersea Power Station, to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s design, was begun in 1932 and is Grade II* listed. Since it reopened in October 2022 the old building has held 254 flats, with new blocks around it by Frank Gehry and Foster + Partners on the 42 acre site.

Fitted kitchens in rented flats see a lot of use between tenants. With oven cleaning booked alone, a single oven starts at £77 to clean and a double at £110. Parking can be harder than the cleaning, because new developments are often excluded from a CPZ and residents may hold no permits to share. Part of Nine Elms, including the tube station, is in Lambeth, so landlords should confirm the council; on the Wandsworth side only HMO licensing applies before professional cleaning between tenancies.