The playwright Owen McCafferty once said of growing up in Belfast in the 1970s: “We lived in a very black and white world then … and we should have been living in colour.” He was pleased with that line – who wouldn’t be. I was pleased just to be standing facing him when he said it. And he was absolutely right, even if I have photographic evidence that there was colour around then – most of it on me, and none of it matching. Belfast of old was a byword for binary oppositions: never mind the “peace” walls, we partitioned the city in our own heads – that street good, that street no-go.

Which is one of the reasons now I take such delight in walking along a street like Union Street, behind the city’s Central Library, even on a dark night, even on my own. Union Street in nights gone by was high up on my no-go list.

With every step I feel like I have been given, or been allowed to take, something back. And that’s before I reach the Sunflower Bar.

If I had to sum up all that has changed for the better in Belfast in recent years, I wouldn’t need to go further than the Sunflower. Actually, I wouldn’t even need to go into the Sunflower (though I am taking you in there in a minute), but just stand for a moment contemplating the neat row of pink tents stencilled on its outer wall.

The Sunflower Bar. Photograph: Paul McErlane/The Guardian

Talk about succinct? Talk about a welcome addition to the city’s palette?

The Sunflower appeared four years back, blooming where previously the Tavern had glowered – one of the last pubs in Belfast to have Troubles-era security gates (“cages”) and cameras at its entrance. It can only be hoped that the bar, which was crowned the best in the city last year, can be spared the wrecking ball after the area was earmarked for an extensive rebuilding programme.

Pedro Donald, the new landlord, painted the gates bright green, hung baskets of flowers from them, and left them permanently open. And only then did the authorities in the form of the Department of Regional Development suggest that they were a public nuisance and try to have them removed.

The Sunflower is also home – upstairs, now, come on – to the Lifeboat, a monthly series of readings hosted by Stephen Connolly and Manuela Moser, two of the new generation of Belfast poets (Belfast produces poets the way Manchester United once produced footballing prodigies: every few years another first team/world-class anthology’s worth), who, when they are not Lifeboating, are working on their PhDs at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University on the other side of the city.

I say “other side”, but really that’s just a walk, too – 20 minutes at a purposeful clip, half an hour if you dander. I recommend the latter: more chance you might meet something along the way, which is where most of the interesting things of my Belfast life have occurred.

I have always preferred being out in Belfast, making it up as you go along, to the more definitive going out, a carry over perhaps from the era when plans were of necessity a bit more, well, provisional.

Now, as then, the Linen Hall Library, halfway between Union Street (“Smithfield and Union”) and the university (“Queen’s Quarter’”), is a reliable diversion, and another venue, as it happens, for readings curated by young writers, in this case Michael Nolan and Padraig Regan.

Belfast, in fact, feels very much like a young person’s town just now, or rather once again: the people who founded the Linen Hall Library in 1788 were frighteningly young, barely out of their teens a few of them, and surprisingly (if your view of Belfast, that is, was served up on the television news for so many years) international in their outlook and politics.

If you want a different view of the city go there, even if it is just to gaze out the windows on to the grounds of the City Hall, home in winter to the Christmas market and in summer to unselfconscious sun worshippers (we don’t get so much of it that we can afford to be self-conscious in its presence).

Home restaurant

The Linen Hall is also on the doorstep of some of the city’s best new cafes and restaurants (we’ve forgotten about Queen’s: like I said, it happens when you dander), on Wellington Place – try Home – and, parallel to that, Howard Street, both of which had been in the doldrums for a few years as the Cathedral Quarter, bordering Smithfield and Union, exerted its gravitational pull on the city’s night (and even day) life.

That’s another thing that has changed for the better: there are more than enough people to go round the whole town, not least because of all the visitors who – and this delights me, too – want to come and spend the weekend with us.

My dad, when I was a kid, had this phrase he was fond of using: “I don’t care what anyone says, I like you.” Not so much a backhanded compliment as a slap in the chops turned chuck under the chin. I loved the smile he didn’t break into when he said it, the same smile Owen McCafferty didn’t break into when he said that thing about us not living in colour.

I always thought it was the kind of accolade Belfast merited: we didn’t care what anyone thought, or wrote (and they wrote a lot), we liked it.

And now it seems, without backhand or sidespin or the slap before the chuck, large numbers of people who weren’t born here like it too.

You would be hard pressed not to smile. As wide as a row of pink tents.

• Gull by Glenn Patterson is published by Head of Zeus (£14.99). To buy a copy for £11.99, including UK p&p, visit bookshop.theguardian.com