I had a similar issue with certain sites not opening even though a connection was being made ( I am in bham as well).
try to see fi you can connect to yahoo answers or tomshardware.co.uk
I basically called them up and they went through all kinds of stuff, none of which worked. Then after an hour and a half I was told to go to this site:
http://www.virginmedia.com/help/broa...ss-website.php and follow whatever it says,and also to get rid of my original antivirus (avast) and use the pcguard that u get with the VM service (which isnt bad at all now, gets the job done). They also got me to basically clean out my IE and Firefox files and add ons.
Initially this didnt seem to do anything but literally next morning...everything started working. Now why that happened is beyond me, cause i know for a fact that if those steps were gonna help they would have done so the first time.
My guess is, after spending an hour and half on the phone with them and getting them to talk to the manager, someone somewhere looked into it and sorted it out.
if nothing works, just give them a ring and go through whatever they say.
Oh by the way, there may be a good chance someone might say "sorry sir but it seems to be the site" and "its your pc", in which case tell them that its not as you can access is from another connection and that you have more than 1 pc running on the connection and non of them can connect.
best of luck