People often have a go at Hove, but I won't.

Sedate, aunty-like Hove. 'A little bit of Rhodesia on the South Coast', one comedian called it.

Another begged for something to do in Hove after nine o'clock in the evening. And I remember when I was first a community worker in Brunswick , which was not in the year that Maggie Thatcher resigned but the one in which she took power, there was a spray-painted slogan on the wall at the bottom of Lansdowne Place.

"No one hears you when you scream in Hove," it said in too bright a red.

It was a poignant testament to the 'houses in multiple occupation'. Five floors, five bells for each and Nicholas Hoogstraten raking in a fortune.

In the popular imagination, Hove was seen as an only slightly younger version of Worthing. All the Young Conservatives in Hove, people used to say, were over 60.

I was told off in Letters the other day (Nov 16, B Taylor) for suggesting, in an aside, that Hove was no longer stuck in this past but beginning to thrive.

No it's not, the writer said, it's just full of charity shops. So, Trimingham-like, I mounted my bike to check out the west of our potential city - what lots of people call 'deepest, darkest' Hove.

I had a particularly good reason last week. On Saturday morning Ivor Caplin and I opened the Poets Corner and West Hove Talk Shop, which is an advice and info centre in Portland Road, just a block from Stoneham Park.

You could call it another charity shop. But it's more than that. Its volunteer staff - including local councillors Murphy and James, Gloria Adiba, the driving force behind the community association and all the others we met there that morning - are one more sign of an increasingly successful engagement with their area, which is beginning to be unrecognisable from even five years ago.

Who remembers Portland Gate, which stood like a rotting elephant carcass on Portland Road? Now it's gone. That whole section of the road is, with the business park opposite, full of handsome new buildings. There is a definite sense of uplift.

Another small but significant success stands at the top of Tamworth Road.

There used to be a neglected set of sink flats, owned by an absentee landlord from East London. Not any longer. This time it was the councillors who got up the mini-campaign to shame the owner into giving back to Hove the building he was holding hostage.

Now developed as social housing, it is a smart local development visible at the end of the road from the main drag.

And there is now so much energy focused on the improvement of Stoneham Park. The council has found a decent tranche of money which has been matched already by some pretty profitable local fundraising.

Now a stroll up to Aldrington Halt in the morning might begin to be a pleasure rather than a good chance to avert your eyes and stare at the ground.

Okay. It's not yet quite a transformation as dramatic as the seafront between the piers which has been turned from dump to diamond in ten years or so by a model investment partnership where it is currently estimated that £1 million of public money has levered nine million of private.

But it's more than a start. Community involvement or the growth of, say, The Red Herring Artists studios which are there might well start the ball rolling.

Perception and a little hype often usefully precede growth. Some small restaurants are already springing up.

And by the by, it's interesting how important a relatively new group of people, the ethnic minority population, has been in all of this.

Several of the newly opened restaurants and small businesses are run by Asians.

There is, unfortunately, some indication that the old businesses don't yet quite welcome their new partners in the area as butter to their bread.

But that, we can all be hopeful, will change as common endeavour in the area submerges any old differences.

So Mr or Ms Taylor, of course you are partly right. A walk down the vastly improved and attractive George Street will nonetheless still take you past too many charity shops, even though they look smart and pretty inviting.

But at the same time, don't knock the beginnings. As the book of cliches says, "From small acorns..."

And that's the thing about cliches - they flow from truth. Or, where there's smoke...