Readers of my city profile of Hull in the forthcoming May issue might conceivably get the impression that I saw the place 30 years ago and haven’t been back until now. Not so, let me assure you…

Hull’s a place I know very well, having family living in nearby Beverley. So this is a city that I have watched most of the way through its postindustrial decline, wincing at the often hamfisted attempts of the planners to put the place to rights. Almost everything they have done has made it worse.

And I have a personal interest in the fortunes of Hull Truck theatre, reviewed by Eleanor Young in the same issue. When I was at university in Durham in the mid 1970s, Hull Truck came to our little theatre with the tragi-comic “Bridget’s House”. It was uncomfortable viewing, but wonderfully good. This time I went to meet Hull Truck’s playwright-director John “Bouncers” Godber. Not only did that play pre-date his tenure, said Godber, but it was the first real touring production the company had put on.

Hull survives, and is at last doing more than just cling on. But much has gone wrong, and much is neglected. I wish I could say that things could only get better from this point on, but this is by no means the case. If you walk up the River Hull, running due north from the Humber, you come across some very fine industrial buildings which are slated for demolition. Among the finest is the excellent Clarence Flour Mills, built in the 1940s to designs by a good local practice, Gelder and Kitchen, who are still flourishing today. Recently occupied by Rank Hovis McDougall but now standing empty with ominous “sold” signs on it, I feared the worst. A call to the architects confirmed it - yes, it’s going to be knocked down to make way for some excruciating new housing, obviously not by them. Meanwhile a regrettable new hotel, down near Terry Farrell’s The Deep, is on much the same scale as the Flour Mills, with none of its character. Why couldn’t someone simply have converted the mills into an excellent hotel?

But far worse than this oversight is the northerly suburb of Kingswood. This is a truly dystopian realm of edge-of-town shopping, roundabouts, distribution warehouses and the like – all totally car-dependent, all laid out very recently across green fields at disgracefully low density, and succeeding in draining life yet further from the already depopulating city centre. I don’t know what the city planners were thinking of, but with all the brownfield sites at their disposal, they should hang their heads in shame. And since its architecture school moved out years ago, there appears to be nobody to act as the city’s urbanist conscience.

So there are some good new buildings – and some very fine old ones, despite years of demolitions – to be found in Hull. It’s well worth a visit. But this is a city that badly needs to lose its self-destructive tendency, and rediscover a belief in itself.