When I tell people I live in Sheffield, they tend to look surprised. Then they dredge their memories. “Ah, cutlery,” they say. Or: “Steel.” Or: “Snooker.” Or, and I’m always waiting for this one: “The Full Monty.”

That film, set in 1980s Sheffield, was a disaster for the city, suggesting a post-industrial wasteland, a place of rust, dust and desperate dereliction. Metal industries may have made Sheffield famous for 600 years but they are giving way to a cleaner, more vibrant city which, with 78 parks and 170 woodlands, is also one of Europe’s greenest.

The nearby countryside is a major selling point. Sheffield sits on the edge of the Peak District National Park, making it a rambler’s paradise. “A dirty picture in a golden frame,” was how it was known in its industrial heyday.

This golden frame is the main reason I’ve spent much of my life here. Now that I work from home in a suburb four miles out, I rarely go into the centre.

When I do, I find another new building has gone up, another new road has been built, and I feel almost a stranger in my own city. It was high time I reconnected with it, exploring like a tourist, discovering the new and rediscovering the old.

MORNING EXCURSION
It’s a 25-minute bus journey from the centre to Fulwood, a suburb almost in the Peak District. From here, you can walk four bracing miles out to Burbage Rocks or Stanage Edge, great inland cliff-faces with stunning moorland views. Fulwood is also on the “Round Walk”, a 14-mile near-circuit of Sheffield.

I get a bus to the start at Hunter’s Bar from where I follow the River Porter downhill for two picturesque miles through Whiteley Woods, past half-a-dozen dams. Two centuries ago, they powered cutlery grinding wheels; now they’re colonised by moorhens, geese, and the odd heron.

GRAB A BITE
The high-ceilinged, comfortably alternative Blue Moon Café (0114 276 3443/bluemooncafe .thebigmenu.co.uk) on St James Street next to Sheffield Cathedral does a fine line in veggie food. As I refuel with spinach and feta cheese quiche and homemade soup, I share a table with Mrs Mary Scholey, whose granddaughter Lucy is working behind the counter.

"I do a lot of walking up and down the hills,” she says. “I don’t do bad for 88.” Sheffield people will talk to anyone; they’re the sort who, when they get off buses, generally thank the drivers.

AFTERNOON ATTRACTION
A 30-minute bus journey takes me to Magna (01709 720002/www.visitmagna.co.uk), a “science adventure centre” in a former steelworks a third of a mile long. In its heyday the works employed 10,000 people, making steel for tanks and battleships, but it closed in 1993 and its vast furnaces were left as dead as dinosaurs.

There’s plenty of hands-on stuff for children, but the highlight is the amazing Big Melt, an all-flashing, all-sparking, all-thundering recreation of the steel-making process that’s like a sound and light show on a volcanic scale. Admission £9.95 adults, £7.95 children.

SUNDOWNER
The Fat Cat (0114 249 4801/www.thefatcat.co.uk), on cobbled Alma Street near the city centre, is a Victorian corner pub with an array of real ales and framed awards. Sip your pint of Hornbeam Bitter in the front parlour, toast the lack of canned music and bleeping games and be surprised that the cigarette machine doesn’t stock Woodbines and Consulate.

DINNER DATE
A five-minute walk from the Fat Cat, along Green Lane, is The Milestone (0114 272 8327/www.the-milestone.co.uk), once a corner pub, overlooking a vast former cutlery factory now reborn as apartments. Stylishly convivial, with wall-sized prints of early 20th-century Sheffield, it runs two menus. Downstairs is gastro (roasted wild boar sausages with rough-cut chips); upstairs is gourmet (roast loin of rabbit, confit rabbit leg and toasted pistachios): generous portions of expertly prepared “modern British” food without airs and graces. Mains from £14.95.

OUT ON THE TOWN
Sheffield’s most famous venue, the Crucible Theatre, is currently being refurbished, so the evening choice could be the Lyceum, a gloriously restored Victorian theatre just across the road showcasing everything from Shakespeare to comedy. But I can’t resist unpacking my sola topi and spending the evening at the enterprising, alternative Showroom Cinema (0114 275 7727/www.showroom.org.uk) watching wonderful archive films from British India.

SLEEP EASY
The Mercure St Paul’s Hotel, with its champagne bar and top-hatted concierge, sets a new standard for Sheffield. It’s adjacent to the award-winning Winter Garden, a 70m-long glasshouse arching like a wooden rainbow, with 2,500 plants. The sleek, elegant hotel has an excellent spa, where therapist Liz Ellison rubs oil into my feet and shows me the Aroma Grotto, Ice Igloo and gym where nauseatingly healthy people are doing strenuous things. Crikey, this is New Sheffield with a vengeance.

My classy fourth-floor room gives me an amazing panorama of my home city and, with it, decades of associations: a dislocating but oddly moving experience. Next morning, I catch the bus home and am back from my “holiday” in just 20 minutes – with not a male stripper to be seen.

INFORMATION:
Mercure St Paul’s Hotel (0114 278 2000/www.mercure.com) offers doubles from £119 per night (two sharing), B&B. Sheffield Tourist Information: 0114 221 1900/www.sheffieldtourism.co.uk