Travel: Hull

THIS summer, almost 30 years after I packed my tartan suitcase and headed to journalism college, I took my boys back to my home town for a staycation. They were less than enamoured with the idea, but I hoped the old place might pull out a few stops and prove itself a worthy destination.

So, we headed for … Hull. Or, to give its proper title, Kingston upon Hull, named for Edward 1 (1272-1307) who needed a secure port from which to supply the armies he sent to fight the Scots.

I left the old place in the safe hands of my parents in 1981. The Humber Bridge, opened by the Queen that year, was the its claim to fame, the world's longest single-span suspension bridge for 16 years until the Danes opened the Great Belt. Every-one was wearing shoulder pads, had a perm and listened to John Lennon – he'd just been shot – and lots of new romantic stuff. You were no-one until you had a frilly shirt and satin knickerbockers.

The Hull my sons and I stepped into from the huge Princes Quay shopping centre was one of caf bars and pedestrianised streets, with a proudly preserved history and maritime culture. It also has a thriving bohemian scene in the Avenues area around the university, whose student numbers swell the population by just under 23,000 annually.

My grandma, who lived off one such avenue in a red brick back-to-back, would be dodging the pavement caf tables and chairs and breathing in aromas of coffee and muffins while making a beeline for her fruit and veg with a shopping bag on wheels.

One of the last 18th birthday parties I went to before I left was at the Crystal Goblet, a function room at the hotel next to Hull's Paragon Station, now called The Royal, and newly refurbished to provide levels of elegance and comfort you'd expect from a superior hotel anywhere. The Goblet shattered to make way for the more restrained Wilberforce Room, into which we peered during a turn round the foyer. I swear if I closed my eyes and listened, I could still hear the strains of Adam Ant drifting from Isabel Maloney's birthday bash.

William Wilberforce is a famous son of Hull, the man instrumental in having the slave trade in Britain abolished. His 1805 Bill meant any British captain was fined 100 for every slave on board his ship, something I'm sure that cut the takings over the bar of Ye Olde Black Boy pub in Hull's High Street. It was here, my 1981 diary recalls, that I spent a January evening before "skipping back down Whitefriargate".

The Boy is one of Hull's oldest pubs, and has probably been a hostelry since the 1300s, though the first official record of its license was in the 1700s. It's in the old town, among the streets surrounding the beautiful Holy Trinity Church and market place, and going back was like taking a bath in history, with the chatty staff telling ghost stories while you sip your real ale.

The old town has seen huge changes, particularly in the Museums Quarter, consisting of Wilberforce House, the Hull and East Riding Museum, Streetlife and the Arctic Corsair trawler. It really is the best place to rediscover historic Hull, and the old warehouses and narrow lanes add to an ambience that makes you want to step back in time. We did this at Streetlife, experiencing the city as it would have been back in the 1940s, with a reconstruction of a high street, old trams and a carriage ride.

Afterwards, we boarded our 21st-century transport and drove out to the Humber Bridge, recreating many such trips made by my parents, when a grand day out was parking on Hessle foreshore and watching the huge sections of roadway being hoisted into position. More such parking went on in my late teens but mainly at night, and my family was definitely not invited.

Our second hotel stay, at The Village, provided us with a high-rise view of the choppy brown Humber and its famous crossing, not to mention a swim in the pool and a really good curry to set us up for our favourite outing, The Deep.

The award-winning 'submarium' – a made-up name, according to communications director Linda Martin – is amazing. There's a 2.5 million-litre capacity tank where visitors can watch sharks, rays and all manner of weird and wonderful fish – 3,500 different species in all. The building itself, designed by Sir Terry Farrell, is stunning, reaching out over the water like a shark's head, or fin. Sir Terry actually had the Yorkshire Wolds chalk escarpment in mind, but I can't shake the fishy image.

We were lucky enough to go behind the scenes, mingling with marine biologists and seeing epaulette sharks in quarantine tanks, as well as chatting to chief executive Colin Brown about plans to turn a dry dock opposite into the recreation of a tropical rain forest and river. But what really seized my imagination was the joint project with Scottish marine biologists to fight the lice decimating our wild salmon population.

The aquarium was taking delivery of a fibreglass toad the day we visited – one of 40 brightly coloured amphibians installed around the city and part of Larkin25, commemorating the life and work of one-time Hull University librarian and poet Philip Larkin, who wrote that work was like a toad, squatting on his life. Of Hull, he wrote: "Her working skyline wanders to the sea." Not so much working any more, but a friendly, welcoming city that really does pull out the stops.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on September 26, 2010