Both actor and location.
Remember the fuss about Eccleston ("every planet has a north") after five prior doctors being London/Home Counties (Tom Baker wasn't obviously Liverpudlian, McGann far from obiously so for his brief stint and McCoy had a very Anglo-refined Irish twang) and suddenly there's the unashamed kid from Salford..?
Scottish is acceptable (though they didn't let Tennant actually stray from his Estuary English outside of Tooth And Claw), though Capaldi still got some stick. But then we get the West Yorkshire accent (not even the fashionable part of Yorkshire, or Herriot-country rurals alongside Davison's Tristan Farnon character) for the Doctor, and a whole bunch of
South Yorkshire accents for the companions (though thankfully not
totally full-blown West Riding or
Dee-Dah).
For location, the revival series was pretty much recurringly London, London, London (when on Earth) except when it was recurringly in Wales (noted as an anomoly, in its early days, you'll maybe recall), with
odd visits to other places (Tooth And Claw, wherever they were in the emergency housing in Turn Left, that whole stint in the US surrounding The Impossible Astronaut, and
several different visits to New York), if identifiable.
Thus the concerted refocus to modern-day Sheffield raised some recently botoxed eyebrows amongst some people that I know were dubious about the Crimson Horror location. And so a rather concerted relocalisation to "The North" (including historic Pendle) was assumed to be yet another attempt at Diversity.
None of it my opinion, nor the other 'complaints', and I mentioned it only really to follow the pattern of
Arson, Murder and Jaywalking. But when some people I know started ranting (about the things I mentioned them ranting about) it
was somewhere in the middle of that particular tirade.
(And the Punjab
was in North India, with the TARDIS apparently giving the convention of the translated-to-English speech various North-Of-England twangs. Didn't bother morphing the later Scandinavian accents, though!)