[ImprovedSilence]

From his writing he sounds British, where class has a somewhat different context and from what I gather, can be inferred from speech/dress.

[defrost]

From his writing:

     Social and ethnic differences seemed to soften the male response, and such a softening was also noted when unicycling in Framlingham, a small Suffolk town to which I had moved from Newcastle. 

responses varied between a large hard industrial northern England city and a softer more rural and idyllic town.

[ZeroGravitas]

I saw a comedy video recently in which the comic suggested that a man using an umbrella in Newcastle was enough to provoke comedic insults from passers by.

If the film Jaws was set in North-East England:

https://youtu.be/PLNA_57a9qE