Pulaski

That advice might sound good from a Canadian perspective, but checks and drafts are rarely used in the UK (compared to 30+ years ago) and there are several reasons not to do so - [1] it may take much longer to get access to your money, it should transfer in a few days, but even these days, depending on the relationship between the sending and receiving bank, it could take up to six weeks; [3] you may lose control of the exchange rate, at least unless the Canadian bank will sell you a GBP draft; [3] you carry the risk of losing the draft, [4] you will have to disclose to customs that you're carrying it when you arrive in the UK, as it is an instrument that has value, and [5] the receiving bank may levy document handling and processing fees that far exceed the wire fees, to handle the "collection" of a foreign draft, and just to rub salt in the wound, after processing the collection of the draft the funds might still be sent by wire and attract sending and receiving wire fees on top!

As per previous advice above, the easiest and safest way to transfer your funds would be a wire, and likely quite competitively (exchange rate) if you qualify for a dealing desk rate.

tdrinker

Something to be aware of when depositing your house sale proceeds in a UK bank. Deposits up to £85k per person (£170k joint account) per bank, building society of credit union is protected by the UK Government in the event the bank, etc. fails. Up to £1m may be protected for 6 months.

However, many banks & building societies are part of a group that share a single banking licence, and the protection is per banking licence not per individual institution sharing a licence, e.g. Halifax building society, Bank of Scotland and Birmingham Midshires building society share a banking licence. So if you are intending to spread your house sale money across several banks / building societies for protection, make sure you research their ownership structure.

https://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/banks-building-societies/

https://www.fscs.org.uk/check/check-...-is-protected/

bats

oh heck, something else to worry about! I swear going back is harder to organise than coming this way

tdrinker

One of the links should have been this:
https://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/

It looks like they will cover £1m for 6 months if it is the sale proceeds of your main residence, so you have a grace period. It'll be easy enough to open several accounts within this period if you do want to spread your funds around, although the risk of a UK bank failing is low - we saw in the 2008 financial crises that the UK government will do its utmost to prevent this happening.

Pulaski

I came back to say the same thing, that the largest banks in the UK, so Barclay's, Lloyd's (including Halifax and Bank of Scotland), RBS (incl Nat West), and HSBC, are almost certainly "too big to fail", meaning that the government would step in to save them, as the government did for RBS in 2008. Allowing banks of this size, to fail, would cause catastrophic economic damage to the British economy.