Thank you both! I've had a look at qjsonparser:

http://git.forwardbias.in/?p=qjsonparser.git

there are only three files and it's easy to just drop them into my application.

I'm making decent progress actually, I've created a QAbstractList to hold my data, even created a new QObject class to call from QML to actually use the web service and create URL's and process the responses.

If it was java it would be so much easier! But got to learn this stuff!