MosEisley - take a deep breath. this will probably be long. It will also make me easily identifiable. But I work on the assumption that I have no privacy on mn. Though if anyone recognises me I'd appreciate it if you waved...
Like you, dh and I lived in the London 'burbs and never quite felt at home and often talked about leaving. We had a "light blub" moment one night when we came up with the idea of renting, instead of buying. Once the seed had been sown - that we could make the move without the huge commitment that selling and buying would involve - there was no going back. With some difficulty - it took about 9 months - we found somewhere to rent for 2 years in a small village in the Peak District - about 3 miles from the village I grew up in. We rented out our London house (again, with some hiccups). NB the rent in the house up north was greater than what we got for our London house.
DDs go the village school. There are about the same number of children in the whole school as used to be in a year (ie 60). This has positives and not so positives. One dd found the move very hard - she left a very close friend and found it tricky at first. She also found the idea of doing it for 2 years, to suck-it-and-see, unsettling. With hindsight it had its downsides and I think she would have made the transition better if it had been permanent from the outset.
Life in the village is great. We have made lots of friends - many more than we made in London. We can pop round to friends' houses for a drink. We can go to the pub and there will be people we know - we have a local, easy, social life - we don't have to trek across a capital city to see people. We borrow things from neighbours. We do favours for each other. We walk each other's dogs.
The place is unbelievably beautiful. DH climbs and mountain bikes - with above friends - and I run lots - again often with above friends. When I walk across the fields behind my house (this is one of the the best bits!) I can call in at my friends' stables and have a cup of tea, making a fuss of her horses, and admiring the view, while the dogs play. Just looking out of my window in the morning lifts my spirits.
We both went freelance - (which is a whole other thread) but now dh has taken a job with 2 days a week in London and the rest from home. He gets up at 5.30 one morning a week and is away one night a week. I know two other families here who have also relocated here - in both cases the dh works in London still - which must be tough. There are also families where people have very long commutes - there's not much employment in the village! but most manage to wangle some time wfh (many are freelancers) and most see it as an acceptable trade-off. Others work in Sheffield - which is a much more manageable commute.
The Peak District is unusal in its accessibility - I can get to John Lewis in Sheffield in 30 minutes. Less on a good day. Though the inclination to go to JL has, thankfully, dipped hugely. However, we spend an awful lot of time driving dds to activities there. (Sheffield, not John Lewis).
The upshot of our 2-year experiment is that we're staying put. Buying wasn't easy - in 2 years of keeping an eye on the market there were only really 2 houses that we'd consider to have ticked enough boxes. And when we viewed them it turned out that only one ticked enough. And house prices here are not cheap. not cheap at all. although they vary there are some villages where they are the same, if not more expensive, than our rather nice suburb of sw London.
On balance it's been an amazing 2 years and I couldn't imagine going back