If I were forced to pick just one place in the whole wide world to sit and have a drink, then it would have to be the terrace of the Tides hotel in South Beach, Miami.

Sipping a cool, cool beer, I can just make out the beach itself with its pastel-coloured lifeguard towers over the grassy dunes 100 yards ahead. Just in front of the dunes lie 100 yards of sandy no-man’s-land where Rastafarians selling coconuts mix with Cubans working out on high bars, showing off to gaggles of micro-bikinied girls giggling in Spanglish. In front of them lies a tarmacked promenade down which swish and swoon an endless procession of heart-stoppingly beautiful in-line skaters.

Meanwhile, directly in front of me is the main attraction: Ocean Drive, or Ocean as it’s known here in SoBe. It’s a beachfront stretch of art-deco hotels to which it feels like the whole of hip America has come to pay homage. Obviously, this being the States, they didn’t walk here. Enormous Hummers pursue little red Corvettes, gloriously customised orange-and-chrome choppers cruise past Hispanics in low-riders, their arms hanging loose out of the open windows that channel their ear-splitting soundtrack in my direction.

All this, and the first time I came down for breakfast, the rapper Jah Rule was sitting at the table next to me, with his pet lion lounging contentedly at his feet.

South Beach is that kind of place. It’s the American Riviera. It’s like Cannes run by hipsters and everyone’s invited, no jacket required. It’s a place where yellow Porsches make complete sense. It’s where I can become someone else.

Five years ago, if you’d mentioned the word Florida, I would have shuddered. Florida, to me, was a muddle of lobster-pink English package-holidaymakers visiting godawful amusement parks while being mugged by the occupants of the millions of stolen vehicles that I could watch every night on World’s Wildest Police Chases. Florida, I thought, was just a redneck, sunbaked, no-go zone.

I was right, but I hadn’t been to South Beach yet. When I was filming Trigger Happy USA, a location finder recommended Miami and off we went. I remember landing and being hit by the wall of heat as we exited the plane. I remember trying to translate the endless tannoy announcements that were made exclusively in Spanish. Had I got on the wrong plane? This wasn’t America. Then we drove over the bridge crossing from downtown Miami onto the curious island that is Miami Beach. I was blown away. This was not my America. This America had gorgeous weather, stunning, slightly faded art-deco architecture and a Latin feel that took the edge off the normal in-your-face Americana without losing the amazing 24-hour service part. This was heaven.

Then I saw the Tides. SoBe is almost totally low-rise and the Tides rises imperiously over its stunted neighbours on Ocean. The lobby has an enormous, double-height space with cool, stone floors and three portholes puncturing the walls on each side, allowing you to see the beach from the pool at the back as though you’re peering through some enormous fantasy telescope.

The whole building has been redone so that the corridor on each floor is at the back and every room in the place overlooks Ocean and the beach. If you can’t be bothered actually to go and stare at the topless hotties on the beach, there is a real telescope at the window of each room. It’s perfection.

I don’t normally like city breaks: go see the big, tall thing, wander aimlessly around the big, open-space thing and hurry through the very old cultural thing. This done, I start to get bored and normally have a big argument with my travelling companion and end up going to the cinema.

This never happens in Miami, thanks to South Beach. I love to take the Versace walk in the evening. His gorgeously excessive house is two blocks down from the Tides. Twice a day he would saunter down Ocean, past the dancers at the Clevelander, skirting the entrance to Gloria Estefan’s uber-trendy Cuban restaurant and end up at the News Café, where, apart from getting a drink and watching the world go by, you can purchase cigarettes and newspapers from everywhere in the world, and I mean everywhere.

Versace would obviously then walk back home, but I tend to avoid that, as he was gunned down on the marble steps in front of his house, and that’s not really my idea of a good night out. He was shot by some crazed stalker, not a random criminal; South Beach actually feels very safe and you can’t help marvelling at how far it has come. Fans of the movie Scarface can have a real good look at how dilapidated and dangerous Ocean was but 25 or so years ago. One of the most violent scenes in the film shows Pacino drive down the strip in an old convertible and end up killing an entire household of Colombians when a drug deal goes wrong. The slow regeneration of the art-deco area and its designation as a historical district was what first attracted the producers of Miami Vice, whose programme really kick-started the place’s ultimate revival back in the 1980s.

Turning off Ocean, I cut through the trendy shopping street that is Collins and get to the slightly scuzzier and definitely hipper Washington. Moving north, I eventually cross Lincoln Road Mall. Lincoln Road, a pedestrian-only zone, hits Miami Beach at right angles. Packed with bars and restaurants and people — so many people — it’s a joy to amble down.