There's a grand new kick-starter for conversations: from Colwyn Bay to Kettering, from Windermere to Woking, expect arguments and umbrage at the research of Jason Rentfrow of Cambridge. His emerging thesis is that the age of globalisation, clone high streets and the internet is not flattening out the personality of different areas, even within Britain. Rather, we are diverging.

The willingness to relocate and the idea of lifestyle choice is amplifying the temperamental differences between regions. Even if Nature originally scattered character types fairly evenly, he concludes, we now cluster regionally with those who think like us. “People,” he concludes, “are happiest where their personalities most closely resemble that of others in that area.”

Thus it seems that Londoners have high levels of creativity and extroversion, but are less agreeable than East Midlanders or Northern Irish; the Welsh are less conscientious than the Scots or English, and Tynesiders and Devonians are among the most neurotic introverts. See? It's dynamite. A grand new way to offend far-flung relatives and weekend guests.

Fascinating, though Dr Rentfrow's first research was in America, and anyone who has travelled will confirm that a conversation in the Bronx runs differently to one in Palo Alto, and that - as a rueful Bostonian told me - liberals congregate along the eastern and western coasts leaving a big conservative heartland. (He added that in Britain he believed it was the other way round, with Tories being driven towards the sea; but admitted that might be because he had a holiday in Eastbourne in 1978).

In the British study, the idea of personality clusters is being reinforced. Most startlingly, Dr Rentfrow finds that London is “psychologically separate from the rest of the nation” with its assertive, efficient, creative, analytical (and disagreeable) streak. This echoes the work of Richard Florida, a professor at Toronto University and author of Who's your City? He says that the “creative class” migrate to certain cities which then prosper, leaving the rest in their shadow. He concludes that prudent towns must try to attract these people by being diverse, bohemian, tolerant and having a good sprinkling of gays and lesbians (in the state of Florida realtors say that to find rising house prices you “follow the fairies”).

As to creatives, look at the efforts being made by Roger de Haan in rundown Folkestone: providing town centre live-work spaces in quirky old buildings to build a creative quarter and prosperity. The Toronto academic goes further, rather insultingly implying that people who stick to their home town are a bit wet - driven by “family, friends, familiarity and fear” rather than their creative destiny.

The fun to be had with these ideas - quite apart from winding up your auntie from Accrington and jeering at hip Hoxtonians - is intensified by their undeniable streak of truth. I may be sitting in a tin shed in Suffolk pretending to be a groovy metropolitan journalist with an Apple Mac, but the wide grey silent sky and the fact that I rather look forward to the momentary company of Tony the Sunday Paper Man creates a different mindset from the one that kicks in when I work to the sound of lorries, a stone's throw from a thousand people I don't know.

Those who live in two places, or visit their parents' turf, are aware of the way that a physical move puts them in touch with a different corner of their own personality. Second-homers chunter about “slowing down”, rustics go all manic and stay up late when transplanted to Soho. Even driving varies regionally: I - accustomed to busy but civil East Anglia - find that whenever I visit my brother in Southampton I am aghast at the inside-overtaking, hooting, swerving and feral hostility of the dread M23. Not all drivers are locals, of course, but enough to cause different atmospheres.

No generalisation is ever absolute, and there are edgy creatives and stolid misanthropes everywhere; yet the personality cluster effect feels real. Nor is it a simple matter of city versus country. Some towns are friendly, others feral; Ipswich is both duller and kinder than Cambridge. Ten minutes' conversation in a Liverpool cab is worlds away from the same experience in Manchester (Scouse cabbie jokes are spikier).

Thinkers such as Thomas Friedman, who argue that the world is flattened by teleworking and the internet, are being proved wrong. But they could have found that out by observing the professional literary Northerners who choose to live in Primrose Hill near their agents, or any of those restless malcontents who try teleworking from a barn conversion for their family's sake and end up fleeing back to the city and the cinemas. We had guests at the old farm once who, looking at the winter fields, could only bleat in panic: “But what is there actually to do?”

Conversely, a Bodenish county wife, on hearing I was off to London in the morning, once chirped: “London - oh lovely - shopping or doctah?” Her London map contained only Harvey Nicks and Harley Street, and the rest was alien and alarming compared with Earl Soham.

And the funniest proof of all came in the year when Radio 4 decided that I should broadcast Midweek from homes all over Britain. Which was fun; but I cannot forget the growing panic of the young London producer when she discovered that in so proudly ticking the “regionality” box she had overlooked the fact that the farther you get from London, the less PC the conversation. In Newcastle a chap innocently cracked a rape joke, and in deep rural Lancashire a dear, well-meaning old boy addressed a black Mancunian as if he were fresh off the boat. The producer was tearing her hair out.

I hope the research gets refined into recognising the difference between Norfolk and Suffolk, Bournemouth and Poole, Broadstairs and Ramsgate. And I hope ministers read it. For public policy now involves far too much homogenisation, centralisation and national “branding”.

There is a terror of the “postcode lottery” and minimal sensitivity to local feeling. A nursery policy that attracts Brightonians may flop in Liverpool, where they'd rather do it their way. A walk-in polyclinic NHS that suits city commuters may be hopeless in rural areas needing cottage hospitals and village surgeries. Attitudes to privacy, entertainment, policing and employment vary from North to South and East to West, and not only for practical reasons. We are a rainbow: running everything from bland, beige Whitehall was never going to work. And now, it seems, it is ever less likely to, as we Carry On Clustering.

Times Recommends

• How to stop the Queen picking the next PM
• To save the planet, strike a deal with Big Oil
• Bankers think it’s all over. Time to think again