Originally Posted by
duchy
Never at Heathrow or Gatwick -and once at London City which I suspect was a mix of visual profiling and boredom as my travelling companion was dressed in hippy style clothes and we were inbound from Amsterdam. She was a couple of bottles and 600 cigerettes over the limit but a bit of fluttering of eyelashes and "but it's my birthday" did the trick and despite a through search of the bags but not ourselves we were on our way. Obviously not looking for booze or cigerettes.
How odd. I'm in exactly the same boat - the only time I can recall being stopped in the UK was also landing back at LCY from a weekend in AMS - must have been 1995 or so. I was travelling with a female. They emptied the bags right out, wanted proof of our outward and return travel (as that's when you could get the double duty free allowance) and found corners of my bag that I never new existed!
Needless to say it was all very courteous and they re-packed for us afterwards but that's the only time i've run into this. Tend to get more hassle at Immigration with the kids, especially when my 2 yr old rocks up with the photo of a 2 week old baby in his passport...