shipping from new york to london

No idea about shipping service, however you'll wnat to give HMRC a call to work out how not to end up paying tax on anything you bring in.

We did this (from LA, not NYC) when my wife moved here. Unfortunately I can't remember who we used, and she's having a nap, but I'll ask her if she remembers when she wakes up.

thanks Poo!

good tip Ed

the right HMRC info

Bit late on this, sorry - we used Fed Ex, and it went smoothly. I think one of the advantages of Fed Ex was that they came to my mother-in-law's house to pick the stuff up, where some of the other companies we looked into wouldn't, you had to take it to a depot. We didn't have any problems with customs charges, but my wife says she had to document clearly every item in the boxes and put that it was personal items. We had about 10 boxes sent over, including a PC, and it all arrived OK.

hey Poo, how expensive was it? i have heard anecdotally that shipping by boat is a lot cheaper.

tracer, the website www.movingscam.com has some pretty useful forums, someone might be able to suggest the US equivalent of the cheaper student shippers.

colette, i suspected you might have a couple of cents to chip in here! r u back in the states today?

yep, and i guess staying out till 4am dancing the night before flying is the way to go because i'm already pretty much back on normal schedule!

basically, i don't know who the NY based companies are, but there are a ton going the other direction which are somewhere between taking stuff to post office for surface mail and full service movers, which seems to be comparatively cheaper. that said, how much stuff is it? if it's heavy but not that big it might genuinely be cheaper for you to buy a friend an airplane ticket to just carry over...

haha - it's k-heavy but not too big -- technics turntables to be precise.

this thread is already the #7 google search for 'shipping london "new york"'!! shippers need to get their s.e.o. shit together

i shipped stuff boat mail (going to nyc from ldn) via royal mail. it was more expensive than i thought it would be, and it took almost 3 months for the boxes to arrive.

so, like, i wouldn't recommend that.

I've never shipped stuff privately, but commercially, the time between US and UK ports is only about 2 weeks even by boat (the slowest way). I suspect commercial freight gets priority, so the rest of the time is prob non-commercial containers waiting at docks and railyards and Customs, which is pretty lame.

anybody else?

I asked the missus if she remembered how much it cost by Fed Ex, and it was A LOT. I'd forgotten it cost so much tbh, she thinks it was $2k, although I'm not convinced it was as much as that. That was for about 10 boxes of stuff though. That was by air though.

jeez

I know. Thinking about it she did sell a ton of stuff on Ebay to pay for moving over here.

An Irish friend moved back home from the States last year -- lots of books, CDs and vinyl, if I recall correctly. I'll ask him who he used.

from the quotes we're getting it would be cheaper for us to ship our stuff from Chicago to Boston via London rather than directly, which is pretty stupid.

How heavy are Technics turntables?!

i think they're around 15kg each

I am that friend - if it's something as small as a pair of turntables, you could look at a company called XS Baggage. Shipping by sea doesn't become economical until you're shipping enough gear to fill a container i.e. 200 cubic feet.

OK Rottenhat I'll check them out - thanks! yeah, it's irritating having such a heavy and awkward yet relatively puny amount of stuff to need to ship

"wheels of steel," more like wheels of pig-iron amirite

It might be cheapest to just buy someone a plane ticket to bring them over - if you could pack them OK into suitcases they'd be inside the checked luggage limits?

http://www.excess-baggage.com/ seem to be the big fish for this in the UK.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/05/22/scope.project/index.html