MARTIN Wainwright recalls his uncle, a vicar in Bradford, explaining why people there never took their overcoats off. “If it isn’t raining, it soon will be,” the thinking went.

It’s an example of how northerners can bolster the clichéd images of the north. The “grumpiness factor” makes it difficult to unpick all those old stereotypes.

“That phrase ‘grim up north’ should be outlawed. We’ve just had enough of that,” Wainwright says. “Something must be done to kill off the old images. They were only part of the story, and they just don’t apply today.

“And we mustn’t conspire in this by clinging to those beloved images and being chippy. Being chippy is disastrous.”

Wainwright, northern editor of The Guardian, challenges popular misconceptions in True North, provocatively subtitled “in praise of England's better half”. It’s an entertaining ramble through the history, culture, landscape and psychology of this part of England.

Along the way, he takes in JB Priestley, Andy Capp (not a northerner but an “everyman”, argues Wainwright), Keith Waterhouse, Robin Hood, Mrs Gaskell and the League of Gentlemen, to name but a few.

In decrying the “fifth column of northern whingers who maintain the dreary mindset of victimhood”, he praises Paul O’Grady and Peter Kay whose autobiographies, like Waterhouse’s, tell of humble northern childhoods, but do so with cheerfulness.

Born in Leeds, Wainwright – son of the late Liberal MP Richard Wainwright – worked in London for 12 years before returning north.

“I’m very anti-London power, but London, physically, I’m not against,” he says. “I don’t go for this thing about Londoners being unfriendly.”

He was galvanised to write the book when, last year, his newspaper advertised a vacancy in Manchester internally, and not one of its London staff applied. Wainwright had also spoken to those charged with enticing BBC staff to move to the MediaCity in Salford, and was told that some metropolitan types seriously believed moving north would be like entering a real-life Hovis advert. So those old stereotypes still endure in London?

“Yes, but not entirely,” says Wainwright. “Manchester and Leeds have been psychologically removed from the north as far as they are concerned. And areas like Cheshire and North Yorkshire, Helmsley, and the Lake District have been mentally taken away because they are so nice.”

Cheshire has even introduced southerners to a new stereotype, ”the Wilmslow look”, including “orange-tanned women” and “far too many owners of four-by-four pretend Jeeps with personalised numberplates”.

“There’s a snobbery in the way people in London would look at it: ‘God aren’t these people vulgar?’,” says Wainwright. “Although I don’t like the orange thing, I like the chutzpah behind it. And Newcastle is fantastic, if you’re ever there in the evening and they’re all partying. I don’t think you see anything like that in London.”

The north which spawned all the stereotypes is now a very different place. Coal mines have, largely, gone. The steel city of Sheffield lost 60,000 jobs but, with Rotherham, produces as much steel as ever. The slums were long ago razed, the air cleaned up. Liverpool went from Boys from the Blackstuff to European Capital of Culture.

All the cities of the north have had their transformations, each with their own particular turning points.

“It’s a cliché, but since the (IRA) bomb, the transformation of Manchester has been extraordinary,” says Wainwright, 59, who lives in Rawdon, Leeds. “In Leeds, it sounds ridiculous, but Harvey Nichols was a turning point. In London, people said ‘Why on earth are they going to Leeds?’

“Liverpool’s moment was when Heseltine went there. Newcastle’s moment was with Angel of the North, the fact that Gateshead, a place which people down south would not even know, had commissioned the most successful piece of sculpture in Britain for the last hundred years.”

The evidence of those transformations is there in the numbers of students heading north.

“Students come here because these cities are fun,” says Wainwright. “When I was a boy in Leeds, you wouldn’t have gone to Leeds for fun.”

Wainwright writes of the local rivalries that divide towns and cities of the north – Manchester v Liverpool, Leeds v Sheffield and the rest.

“You find it everywhere,” he says. “Second only to London, the place people despise most is whatever’s next door. But it is quite strong in the north.”

» True North:In praise of England’s better half by Martin Wainwright is published by Guardian Books, £18.99.