INSTINCT has always drawn me to places that lots of people tell me to avoid. The Albanian capital Tirana, for example, turned out to be a delightful city despite the dire warnings of almost everyone I met en route through other Balkan countries, while travelling in parts of South Africa by train is not only scenic but safe, contrary to the predictions of an untimely death I attracted in advance.

The US city of Detroit is another such place. For years I’ve wanted to visit, but whenever I mentioned this to American friends their faces would contort into an unspoken statement of “why on earth do you want to go to a dump like Detroit?” Indeed, few cities have such terrible PR, both within the United States and beyond, but then that’s what several decades of news stories about race riots (1967), white flight (1970s and 80s), urban decay (the 2000s) and bankruptcy (2013) tend to do.

My brother shared in this bafflement having passed through 18 years ago after working at a youth camp in upstate Michigan, but the city was a very different place in 1998, at the low point of its decline. I first visited in July, shortly after attending the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and I wasn’t disappointed, for Detroit’s recent rejuvenation – charted, among others, by the New York Times – meant I could indulge in some “ruin porn” as well as experience the resurgent Downtown area.

I rarely revisit cities or countries, but I was back just two months later as part of a six-week pre-election road trip throughout the US (although I didn’t actually do any driving). While Detroit was once a major transport hub, largely so the cars it churned out for much of the 20th century could be distributed across the country, it now boasts an inaccessible airport, intermittent trains and a rather sorry-looking Greyhound bus terminal.

On my second visit I stayed in Midtown and felt I was in a completely different city, a much hipper, bustling environment than the often eerily-deserted Downtown. Midtown is not only home to Wayne State University, but also a plethora of museums and galleries, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, which boasts the astonishing “Detroit Industry” fresco by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, commissioned in the early 1930s by Edsel Ford and an artistic homage to Motor City’s heyday.

There I met a curator called Jill Best, who took me through its history in an Anglo-American accent that also betrayed a few years studying English at the University of Edinburgh. This was apt, for I’d returned to the city partly to explore its Scottish connections, of which there are a surprising number. But then immigration was a fundamental part of the American Century, and many of those immigrants arrived from Scotland – often via Canada – to work in the once-thriving motor industry.

Originally named Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit, the city was founded in 1701 by the French officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, after whom the car was later named. British troops gained control of the settlement in 1760, shortening the name and only ceding it to the fledgling USA in 1796. Three flags outside the faded-but-engaging Detroit Historical Museum capture this mixed French-British-American provenance, although the original (British) Union flag (a composite of the St George and St Andrew’s crosses) is rather spoilt by the inaccurate description underneath: “England, 1760.”

Even before Henry Ford successfully developed the world’s first mass-produced automobiles, Detroit was a prosperous industrial city that attracted upwardly mobile workers from all over the world. On St Andrew’s Day in 1849 thirty-five “Scotchmen and Descendants of Scotchmen” met to found a benevolent society for the relief of the “indigent and unfortunate of our Countrymen, and for the promotion of harmony and good feeling amongst ourselves”.

The St Andrew’s Society of Detroit soon organised an annual Highland Games, which eventually became the oldest continually-running games in the western hemisphere. In 1903, meanwhile, the society initiated the greatest number of new members in its history, and four years later the cornerstone was laid for the building which would become known as St Andrew’s Hall, on East Congress Street near the Detroit River. A large brownstone building with an extensive basement, the second-floor Burns Room hosted society meetings for almost a century.

Later, St Andrew’s Hall would become a microcosm of the wider Detroit story. Constructed during the city’s early 20th-century boom, by the late 1980s the society’s membership declined as more people became reluctant to travel to the increasingly dangerous Downtown area. In 1994 it was sold to a rock music promoter having already become one of the most iconic music clubs in the US. Eminem performed in the basement, while the main hall played host to Bob Dylan and bands like REM. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who bequeathed some graffiti). Detroit is, of course, renowned for its music; during the summer I saw Detroiter Diana Ross perform there, while the Motown Museum is a must-see.

I had a tour of the hall with three stalwart members of the St Andrew’s Society, now housed in the Kilgour Center in Troy, a town to the north of Detroit: Michael Kelly, an architect and son of a Glaswegian, Ian Hunter, an attorney whose ancestors hailed from Carluke, and Ann Campbell, who was actually born in Dundee but left in 1956. She ended up working for General Motors, while Kelly’s father had been an executive at Chrysler.

Perhaps he encountered Arthur Donaldson, another Dundonian who spent most of the 1920s working for Chrysler in Detroit. Despite being thousands of miles from home, Donaldson maintained a keen interest in Scottish affairs and became an overseas member of the National Party of Scotland when it was founded in 1928, also acting as the US sales rep for the Scots Independent newspaper. On returning to Scotland the following decade, he became one of the new Scottish National Party’s first leaders.

It isn’t hard to grasp why so many Scots, including hundreds from the Western Isles, were drawn to Detroit. When Henry Ford began his auto-assembly line thousands more men (and women) travelled to the city, lured by his offer of a $5-per-day wage, unheard of at that time and almost twice what workers at competing plants were receiving. I visited the atmospheric Ford Piquette Avenue plant north of Downtown, where the Model T Ford was conceived and first manufactured. And if it hadn’t been for a $10,000 investment by the Edinburgh-born banker John S Gray, it might never have happened.

I stayed a short walk away at the excellent Inn on Ferry Street, which consists of four restored Victorian homes and two carriage houses near the Detroit Institute of Arts and several other engaging museums. Like many other suburbs of the city, these fine buildings were once semi-abandoned, but gentrification isn’t just reserved to Brooklyn, it’s reached Michigan too. When I was in town workmen were busy installing a trolley car (or tram) the length of Woodward, meaning that Down and Midtown will be connected by public transport for the first time.

The city’s redevelopment hasn’t always been as successful. I had a late lunch with members of the St Andrew’s Society at the Renaissance Center, a group of seven interconnected skyscrapers on the riverfront, a design so confusing that its architect reputedly got lost in his own building. Beyond that well-meaning 1970s attempt at regeneration (it’s now General Motors’ HQ), Detroit has one of the largest surviving collections of late 19th and early 20th-century buildings in the US, highlights including the Art Deco Guardian and Fisher Buildings.

It’s that confident, stylish look that would have been so familiar to the thousands of Scots resident in Detroit between the wars. Among them were the grandparents of former Herald journalist Torcuil Crichton, who sailed to Canada on the ship Metagama in 1923, paid by the British government to make a new life in the Dominions. From there they skipped the border (illegally) and ended up in Detroit. He believes they met at the Gaelic Society (until recently a Gaelic-speaking Lewisman still led the Free Church congregation in Livonia, just outside Detroit) but, unusually, opted to return to Lewis after benefitting from the automotive boom.

For Scots who weren’t as prosperous, or fell on hard times, the St Andrew’s Society – now the oldest benevolent society in Michigan – would step in. That charitable work continued more recently when, following the 1996 Dunblane massacre, the society set up a national clearing house to collect funds and toys, after which the then-president Randall Cain travelled to the Perthshire town in order to present its people with a cheque for $35,000 – around £30,000.

But the Scottish dimension is just one of a plethora of reasons to visit Detroit, an unjustly neglected – and often absurdly denigrated – city that was once among the United States’ greatest, and could soon rise again.

TRAVEL NOTES

Getting there and where to stay

Many (indirect) flights from the UK to Detroit can be very expensive, but the cheapest way to get there is to fly from London Gatwick to Toronto (WestJet does return flights for as little as £281) and then catch another flight (several each day for around £175 one way), a train or hire car – it takes about four hours by road or rail. There are many decent hotels, but the Inn on Ferry Street (innonferrystreet.com) is by far the most atmospheric, as well as being conveniently located.