And if you don't have a scanner or anything, just spend the "dead" time at your airfield/school by sitting in an airplane and just listening in to the R/T. Most schools don't mind that, as long as you don't run the battery down. (The resident engineer might be able to hook you up to ground power.)
If you get an intercom splitter (such as this one:
Video Recorder Audio Adapter - Fixed Wing - MyPilotStore.com) you can use any audio or video recorder (laptop, iPhone, ...) to record a few hours of R/T, to use at your leisure later. (Technically that would probably be illegal but as long as you don't distribute it, who's going to know?)
It's true that most ATC sites on the internet are indeed US, and US R/T is different from the UK. But you should be able to find some other European countries online that are quite similar to the UK.
Atcbox has a number of Dutch feeds and since the R/T in NL is all in English, you should be able to gain something from them. Dutch controlled fields are very similar to UK controlled fields, and Dutch uncontrolled fields are very similar to UK A/G fields (except for the overhead join, which is not used in NL). There is no real equivalent to a UK AFIS field however that I know of, that would be useful listening to.
UK ATSOCAS services are also pretty unique so listening to a foreign en-route INFO service will not help a lot.