A regional press feature writer and columnist has hit back at a national magazine article denouncing his home city as “bleak”.

Erik Petersen, of the Nottingham Evening Post, has written a sarcastic and barbed riposte to a Spectator article by Robert Beaumont.

In the story Robert recalls a visit to Nottingham and describes a melancholy hanging over the city and a “lack of imaginative regeneration in the city centre”.

The piece has already been met with anger by the City Council who called the article an “uninformed piece of jaundiced journalism”.

Now Erik has taken the story to task, sarcastically suggesting media students use it as a guide to writing stories about towns north of London and mocking the Spectator writer’s geography.

“Our man Robert seemed to have become a bit disoriented with this one,” Erik wrote.

“He started off referring to Nottingham as an East Midlands city. But mere paragraphs later he’s back on track, explaining how Radford is ‘a chilling example of the urban decay which is withering the soul of many a northern town’.”