Short-Let Damage Reports: What a Photo Inspection Should Cover After Every Guest
Written by Iva, founder of Iva Cleaning Services London. Damage in a short let is rarely dramatic. It is a…
A church is the hardest building on our list to clean well, and the easiest to damage by cleaning badly. The same room can hold a Victorian encaustic tile floor, lime-plastered walls, oak pews with a hundred years of wax, brass that has been polished every week since the Great War, and stained glass that must not be touched with anything wet. A product that is right for one of those ruins another. The checklist below is organised by material rather than by room for that reason, and it separates the jobs a volunteer rota can do from the ones that need a contractor with the right equipment.
It is the list we work from on church cleaning in London contracts, and it applies with small changes to chapels, meeting houses and any historic place of worship.
Before anyone touches a surface, find out what it is. A listed church will have a quinquennial inspection report from the architect that names the floor, wall and joinery materials; the churchwarden usually has it. If in doubt, treat every surface as the most fragile version of itself: stone as soft, wood as waxed, metal as lacquered, glass as painted. Dry methods first, water second, chemicals last and only where the material is known.
Encaustic and quarry tiles, flagstones, marble and terrazzo all appear in London churches, often in the same building.
Lecterns, altar rails, memorial plaques, candlesticks and light fittings. Two questions first: is it lacquered, and is it a memorial? Lacquered brass needs only dusting and a wipe; polishing strips the lacquer and starts a cycle that never ends. Memorial brasses set into the floor or wall should not be polished at all; dust them and leave them. For unlacquered brass that has always been polished, a non-abrasive brass cleaner on a cloth, applied to the cloth not the object, with the surrounding stone or wood masked so the polish does not stain it. Monthly is plenty; weekly polishing wears the engraving away over decades.
Stained glass is painted on the inside face and the paint can be loose. Do not wash it. Dust the leads and the inside face with a soft brush once or twice a year and nothing more; anything beyond that is a conservator’s job. Plain glazing, porch windows and glass doors are cleaned normally with water and a squeegee. Window ledges and the deep stone sills under windows collect dead flies and dust and are a weekly task.
Lime-washed and lime-plastered walls are dusted, never washed. Cobwebs are removed with a long-handled soft brush or a vacuum on a pole; in a high nave this is a job for a contractor with telescopic poles or access equipment, done once or twice a year. Painted walls in halls and vestries are washed normally. Ledges, cornices, the tops of screens and the backs of organ cases hold decades of dust and are the usual source of the “dusty church” smell; an annual high-level clean deals with it.
Kneelers, pew cushions, altar frontals, banners, carpets and curtains. Vacuum kneelers and cushions on a low setting through a mesh screen so the fabric is not pulled. Altar frontals and banners are not for the cleaning rota; dust them lightly and refer anything more to a textile conservator. Carpets in aisles and the nave are vacuumed weekly and hot-water extracted once a year, more if the building is used for lunch clubs or a nursery during the week. A church carpet runner is the same job as any other commercial carpet cleaning in London, with care taken not to over-wet the floor underneath.
The parts of the building let for toddler groups, elections and concerts are cleaned like any public venue: toilets daily when in use, kitchen surfaces and the floor after every booking, bins emptied, touch points wiped. A church kitchen used to serve food is subject to food hygiene law and may be inspected; it needs the same cleaning schedule as a café, with the oven and extractor on a termly deep-clean list.
Most parishes run on a rota of volunteers who sweep, dust and do the flowers, and that is fine for the weekly tasks above. The jobs that go wrong on a rota are the ones that need equipment, height, time or product knowledge: high-level dusting in the nave, machine scrubbing of a tiled floor, carpet extraction, the annual pew wax, cleaning after building work, and the deep clean of a hall kitchen. Those are the tasks to contract, on a quarterly or termly basis, with a written list of what will and will not be done to each surface. A contractor who turns up with a bleach mop and a can of silicone polish has not understood the building; ask what they will use on the floor before they start.
The same rules, with their own sensitivities, apply to mosques, synagogues, temples and gurdwaras. Prayer carpets in particular are a specialist job, covered in how to clean prayer mats and mosque carpets.
Need a contractor who knows which bucket goes where? Get a free quote for a one-off deep clean or a termly contract and we come back within one working hour.
