You're about right on salaries in the UK. Its a strange market here, its very hard to find good staff and generally companies want far too much experience for a Junior role.
We take on new recruits with little to no experience in the field and train them from 6-18 months. We've taken designers and turned them into very good ruby developers as well as no experience to full-stack devs.
It really depends on the company though, look for a company who is focused on training. The salary should also increase in 6 months at a minimum and there should be a clear path to earning a decent salary.
We start at around 16-18K and have reviews every 3 months. The goals are set by the employees (we track this using a free product we made called Meta Trails check it out!) and as long as they say they've hit there targets its a 20% raise. Heres what it looks like in real life:
Starting 18K
3 Months: 21.6K
6 Months: 26K
9 Months: 21K
12 Months: 37K
After a year we move to a normal review period of 1 year. The reason we do this is we put a lot of time / money into training and our results are fantastic. I'd like to see more companies hiring Jr developers.
We are actually looking for another developer to join the team drop me an email josh[at]seriousfox.co.uk