I truly believe that as a novelist, you cannot adequately describe the weather in England - the light, the dampness, the bitterness, the summer softness, and so on - without having experienced it.
You do not know, and the readers cannot tell you, what they might like until they have it. It is one of those things that particularly if you want to be the next wave, well the next wave is not already on the bestseller lists. The next wave is in somebody's head.