The sun has finally come out of solar minimum, by far the longest time of no sun spots in recent history (last 100 years).

Space weather is a good site for what's going on and this site has live data of the solar wind near Earth. The bottom graph is the KP level of aurora. This denotes how much power they have and how far south you can see them. KP 7-9 to be able to see it from UK (Scotland most likely).
It appears there is a coronal mass ejection (CME) event going on now (02/09/10).