Editor-At-Large: All my life I've avoided it. But now I have descended into Hull

This isn't a trick question. But how can the image of caravans be changed? Should we be calling in Dazed & Confused's founder Jefferson Hack to photograph, say, Sophie Dahl or Saffron Burrows throwing a party in one? Caravans featured heavily last week on my grand trip to the North-east, via Hull, Grimsby, Gateshead and Easington.

I've been thrilled by bridges, bombarded with hailstones and walked through acres of dog shit, but more of that later. The caravan, in all its box-like unfashionability, was somewhat of an underlying theme, and at one point I stood by an assembly line where one emerged complete every 18 minutes. That is one of the single most shocking facts I've encountered in a long time, so while you digest it I'll return to the start of my tour – Hull.

For six months I have been receiving lavishly produced postcards with pictures of yachts in a glamorous marina, an astonishing building that looked like a pointy fish, and waterside Victorian warehouses, ripe for conversion. Buzz words such as "pioneering", "fabulous" and "vision" loomed large, together with the extraordinary information that all this was in Hull; they came from Mr John Till whose job it is to persuade us that Hull is one of the top 10 most "happening" places in the UK. How could I resist?

The cards were followed by audio cassettes, lavish laminated folders, Filofax-style glossy brochures, and finally a little gold cog lapel pin representing Hull's new pioneering symbol. I telephoned Mr Till and told him he had four hours of Street-Porter time to flog 21st-century Hull. I added a small proviso – a trip to a caravan factory. I pointed out that I had typed the words "Hull" and "caravan" into my computer and had been rewarded with countless websites revealing that Hull is without a doubt the caravan manufacturing centre of Britain. How did that square with the world of trendy graphics and yachting marinas?

There is a serious point here. A key concern today is regeneration – but can a city reinvent itself through buildings alone? How do you teach people that education and culture are more important than a bag of chips and a night watching Big Brother? What about all the under-educated, drug-using, petty criminals that might form part of the population? The city, after all, has been described recently as the drugs capital of Britain. As for visitors, Hull isn't exactly on the way to anywhere either, sitting about as far east as you can go from Leeds, nice and exposed on the edge of the windiest estuary in England, with a thriving port. And how do you persuade people that pour off the ferries in the port to make a small detour into a city that's not exactly over-represented in the Good Food Guide? Hull may have been the birthplace of Amy Johnson, Maureen Lipman and William Wilberforce, but a lot of people just couldn't wait to leave. (The only person of any note who wanted to stay was Philip Larkin – an excellent poet, but a wretched misanthrope.)

I sat in John Till's office on the waterfront while he enthused about his consciousness-raising exercise. He has to make people from Hull proud of their city, because then businesses will come and invest there, and the middle-classes will move into the old buildings along the river in the centre, and after them will come the cafés and bars and boutique hotels, and then tourists will discover that Hull is worth a stopover, along with York and Leeds. Cities such as Liverpool and Canterbury are bidding to be the 2008 European City of Culture. Glasgow did it, and Salford has just relaunched itself with the Lowry and the War Museum. So, can Hull? According to Mr Till, it has to be somewhere that executives' partners want to live, as he explained the "trailing spouse" syndrome. That means places to eat, shop and be entertained. Where do you begin? Hull has no buffer zone of middle-class suburbia: it's a place where industry extends right into the centre.

They've got off to a good start with The Deep, a marine life centre, shaped like a shark's fin, designed by Terry Farrell, jutting out over the Humber in uncompromising style. The Deep is fabulously successful, achieving its year one visitor targets after only four months. As I arrived, a hundred anxious pensioners thronged the foyer. A lady liked the plaster mermaids in the shop so much she'd just bought four for her relatives. My journey to the bottom of the ocean meant manoeuvering around hundreds of happy punters. In the giant central fish tank a large cod had been brought from a fish farm in Scotland as the local supplies had been exterminated years ago. No complaints about fish in captivity, although one woman thought the jellyfish looked very miserable. The Deep is well worth a couple of hours, but what then? In the old city centre by the river the William Wilberforce museum is unforgettable, with cases of shackles and branding irons and an upsetting reconstruction of life below deck on board a slave ship.

The port frontage runs for nearly seven miles with two of the largest ferries in the world making daily trips to Rotterdam. At the other end of town a stunning sports stadium is nearing completion. Next to it are houses people can't even give away – that's the dilemma of Hull. A huge shopping complex designed by Lord Foster is to be built next, including a theatre for the Hull Truck Company, founded by award-winning writer and director John Godber. We talked in a working men's club where he was shooting a new drama, Thunder Road, to be shown in 30 daily three-minute episodes on the city's interactive television channel in November. John Godber admitted to owning a caravan, so it seemed a natural progression to the Cosalt factory, where the subtle differences between a tourer, a motorised caravan, a caravan holiday home, and a residential park home were explained to me. Confusing isn't it?

The Humber bridge is sensational, but it only takes you to grim Lincoln or ghastly Grimsby, where I ate the worst fish and chips for a long while. Heading north, the next stop was the Baltic in Gateshead – a jaw-dropping conversion of a flour mill into an art gallery. But the Baltic wouldn't work without the lifeline of the superb bridge over the Tyne outside, and top-quality restaurants and bars. People have to be eased into art via shopping and food, and there's nothing wrong in that. Hull's got a long way to go.

South of Gateshead, more rebranding. Durham council has created an excellent new 11-mile coastal path, past a strip of mining villages including Easington, made famous by the film Billy Elliot, set back from unspoilt cliffs covered in flowers. The residents of Seaham have new marine-inspired benches. But the path is festooned with dog shit and signs are missing. It ends by a caravan site in Crimdon, but don't let that put you off. Caravans are just something that even fervent rebranders have to learn to live with.