Is this showing its going from the UK to NYC then back to the UK?
I suppose it does, though I don't know the exact physical location of each of the routers on the path.
Looks like most of your latency is on the hop between tele-ic-4-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.174.18] and 10gigabitethernet2-2.core1.ash1.he.net [206.223.115.37] (where in the world is ash1?)
Having the latency show up on a peering link makes it a bit harder for you to track down who is responsible for the latency. Maybe the peering link your packets used to go through is no more. Maybe the advertisements from HE changed and caused traffic to take a suboptimal path. Maybe virginmedia is routing traffic through a suboptimal path.
I can think of two ways for you to proceed. Since you appear to be a customer of virginmedia (directly or indirectly), you can contact them and ask what's up with that? You'd have go through the customer support at your ISP (which AFAIK sucks for most ISPs). Alternatively you can aim for the other end and contact
ipv6@he.net and ask what may be the problem.
In any case you'd need to include the output of your IPv4 traceroute and ask why the traffic takes such a long detour.