Newcastle is shiny and tanned but obsessed with football and booze; Liverpool is spikey and maudlin; Manchester has a heart of gold and a cheeky sense of humour to magic away the rain; Yorkshire is cold and full of Geoffrey Boycott clones, an army of complaining, smug men in golfing casual, drinking Yorkshire Tea and counting every penny. The north of England is still seen as a place of mills, mines and factories, or a place of sheep and hills. Every book, television programme or film that uses the north of England as its stage finds in it a world of flat vowels, of menfolk struggling to find a role for themselves, while the women make their way in the world proudly. The north is a place where white, working-class masculinity is constructed and performed. The north is still viewed through the lens of the county rivalries, the romantic landscape, the working-class, white, male leisure and cultural habits: eating fish and chips, drinking bitter with a head, listening to brass bands and watching rugby league, as if any of those things are essentially (or inherently) northern, or inherently masculine, or white, or working-class (Russell, 2004; Wainwright, 2010).