From his writing he sounds British, where class has a somewhat different context and from what I gather, can be inferred from speech/dress.
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.If the film Jaws was set in North-East England: