Owning your own home

Will you be able to meet other newb parents locally?

As with @fizzy.bleach my concern would be as the kid growing up there.

Having lots of activities and things we can do within a walkable distance in London is good. Parks, playgrounds, libraries, swimming pool, soft play, book shops, toy shops, friends houses etc. It may be that you can drive to do all those things very easily. Getting out of the house easily without the need for a car journey feels crucial for my sanity with kids.

I think living in a village that is walkable with a buggy, has nice amenities, has some swings and a playground, a stream to paddle in, lots of footpaths, nice woodland, would be great. I lived in a village like that until I was five or six.

Visiting where both sets of grandparents now live (one small town, one very remote village), I feel like we run out of things to do with kids very quickly and would go mad after more than a week there.

One last thought - my impression of a lot of small villages is that their population is more elderly retirees. I would also want other kids and parents around.

Everything t-v said.

At least if you have older kids you just have to drive them to friends houses/local town centre and they can entertain themselves on their phone the rest of the time so you don't always have to listen to them bitch about living in the middle of nowhere.

Ymmv but mini-H was a nightmare infant and just having a park and decent size tesco within walking distance helped keep my OH semi-sane. Had we been in the middle of nowhere I dread to think how appalling life would have been. Until you have a baby it's hard to understand how crushingly lonely it can be sometimes.

Where we live is pretty clicky / people have poor social skills and TBH in the early days I wondered if living somewhere like St Albans would have been better as there are SO MANY families which means there are multiple baby classes pretty much every hour of every day, which would have made making baby friends that much easier.

Imo you go to live in those sorts of places many to get away from people. Fully detached. Space to work on your cars, motorbikes, model train set, etc. You can always move if your circumstances change.