Hi there. Firstly, thanks for the replies to my previous posts.

I managed to change my upper control arms (UCA) without removing the shock absorber. This is not my discovery, I stood on a lot of shoulders to get here, but with any luck these instructions will come up for other people trying to do this job too.

This is what I did (I'm not a mechanic which should be obvious by my poor grasp of the technical names of components)-

1. Put a jack stand under the frame and remove the wheel.
2. Apply your favourite loosening spray to all the bolts and nuts and wire brush them.
3. Remove the brake calliper and support it.
4. Uncouple the wheel sensor cable from the brake lines all the way up and then from the mounting bracket. NOTE: You are not removing it, just giving it a little more play because it stays attached to the parts that are moving up and down.
5. Remove the top nut of the front stabilizer link (15mm deep socket AND 15mm wrench or two wrenches).
6. Put a jack under the LOWER control arm by the ball joint (or under it if you have a jack that goes really low) and take the weight.
7. Remove the three top bolts for the shock (15mm deep socket or wrench). DON"T REMOVE THE CENTRE ONE ATTACHED TO THE SHOCK ITSELF!!!
8. Detach the ball joint nut (21mm) then the joint. I tapped and hammered and used a pickle fork.
9. The big hub mounting piece of metal the UCA ball joint was in now has a hole in it where the ball joint spindle was. I put a bungee cord in there and attached it so that it didn't swing around.
10. Slowly lower the jack and the shock will start to lower too. When it goes down as much as it can, the shock mounting studs will be not be quite low enough to come out of the cup.
11. Now you need to pry on the shock/spring a little until the front two shock studs pop out, and they will "pop" out as the shock will want to swing out. BE VERY CAREFUL. If you really pry hard, and it will have to be very very hard as the centre nut in the shock is considerably higher than the other three, and free the whole thing, it will shoot sideways quite far and could hit you in the head or something.
12. Loosen the UCA nuts (21mm wrench AND deep socket or two wrenches). You could do this earlier but if it is really loose it could hang up in the spring as you lower it.
13. Remove the long bolts and the UCA
14. Replace the UCA. I left it loose-ish for now.
15. Pry the shock back into the shock cup.
16. Slowly jack up the lower control arm being sure to first guide the end of the stabilizer link through the hole in the stabilizer bar and then guide the shock studs through their holes.
17. Now you can tighten everything up again.

I hope this helps someone.