@jac The point of a VPN is not to avoid your own location, but to ensure you sit behind a secured service to ensure that your own location and IP addressed are not exposed. In most cases, you should actually choose the location closest to you for performance purposes, unless you need to use an alternative location to gain access to streaming services.
By default NordVPN and others will always choose the location that is geographically closest to you for the performance gain. In essence, no - it’s not necessary to avoid the UK connections at all. Provided the relevant security is in place, then you are good to go. For NordVPN (and probably ExpressVPN also), if you go to their website, they will tell you if you are protected or not.
For example, an unprotected session under NordVPN looks like this
Whilst the protected session looks like this
Obviously, if you use ExpressVPN and then go to the NordVPN page, then it’ll think you are not protected as you are using another service. The best way to check is to disable the VPN, then go to
https://www.whatsmyip.org/
Then, re-enable the VPN, go back to the Whats My IP site, then reload the page. Your recorded IP address should have changed.
Hope this helps.
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. Concerning.