There are definitely two clearly different families of Scouse accent, the sharper, more guttural one north of the Prescot Road and the softer and more rounded one to the south.
My natural accent is Woollyback, Scouse as spoken outwith the city itself, since I spent my formative years on the Wirral (Woollybacks are also found in south Lancashire and parts of Cheshire and North Wales.
I love the Scouse accents in all its forms and I get on the defensive whenever people say it is ugly. I know Brummie gets this too, I have no dog in that fight but I do sympathise. Whenever I hear Winifred Robinson's upmarket Scouse on the wireless I get a very warm glow. Conversely, and I wasn't going to talk about accents I dislike but I have my reasons, I dislike London accents. This is partly down to bullying for my accent having been dropped in Welwyn Garden City (full of London overspill in the 60s) at the tender age of 11, and partly because of the free pass "cockney" culture gets in comparison to other working-class accents. In primary school on Wirral we were told our Woollyback accents and culture were "common" and undesirable whereas we were taught approvingly of pearly kings and queens, and "cockney" rhyming slang, which may have been invented in the thieves' middens of the East End but long since became more widespread. Oh yes, and chirpy cockneys being defiant in the Blitz, as if the people of Liverpool and Hull and Clydebank didn't get the shit bombed out of them night after night too.
