Someone asked me about Liverpool. Liverpool is not part of England in the way that New York is not part of America. It’s more Welsh, more Irish, a shifty, shifting outpost of defiance and determination reluctantly connected to the English mainland, an island set in a sea of dreams and nightmares that’s forever taking shape in the imagination, a mysterious place jutting out into time between the practical, stabilising pull of history and the sweeping, shuffling force of myth.

It’s where it says it is on the map: just up there, and along there, down under what’s above, above what’s below, and rivers and roads and railway lines draw it towards England, and a little bit further out, and you can easily find ways in and out without losing track of time or leaving behind English weather, English telly or English moods. Liverpool, though, fancies that it can just keep going, leave the green, mean, limiting England far behind, climb mountains, crack open new territory, even conquer space.

Liverpool has always forced itself forward through the grimy thick and thin of rise and fall, success and failure, hope and hopelessness, despite what was said about it, however hostile the assault on its emphatic, bittersweet rhyme and reason. Liverpool is always on guard. It knows that the English look up and over with suspicion and doubt, stumped by the language, needled by the snappy, mongrel confidence, outmanoeuvred by the fast, logic-shredding wit. It’s always wary of what might appear over the horizon, from the endless heavy sea, of what unknown force, for good or evil, might wash up on its vulnerable, open shore.

The city has had more money than some and been poorer than most, it’s seen better days, it’s always on the up, it believes in itself, it’s all on its own. It’s been associated with grotesque episodes in history, it’s had ideas that have contributed to the immense civilised progress of the whole world. Its hands are dirty, but its mind is open. You can hear it in the way Liverpool talks. You can hear all its grievous, glorious past in a single sentence spoken about nothing much in particular. Local history, and its well-reported impact on the planet, fizzes on the tongue of a Liverpudlian. You can hear the enterprise and belligerence, the flippancy and the rage, the ambition and the stubbornness, the influx of this, the passing through of that, the constant rumour of the exotic. You can hear the guilt, defensiveness, aggression and pride, the determination not to be taken for a ride, the hunger to be in the know, first in line, on the hoof, ready for anything, dead on the money.

In a single sentence spoken about nothing much in particular you can hear that this is a city that’s fought off all manner of danger, derision and repression, from inside and outside, and has lived to tell the tale – and tell it with spectacular, cunning relish. You can hear arrogance and music, love and anger – a turbulent, tragic city folded into speech. Friendly, violent vowels connect friends and family and streets and memories and strangers with everything that’s happened, that’s come and gone, that’s lived and died, across 800 years. It’s the sound of a people who have been loved and hated, ignored and exiled – an inspired, persecuted collection of voices, religions, myths, schools and traditions that have fused together in one place where, against all odds, they found a refuge, a home, a future.

Liverpool has always been about the future, seeing it first, digging it up out of nowhere, grasping its potential, exploiting the results. The future being glossily layered over it is a cosmetic one, a commercially contrived one, an illusion that does not represent the essential foreignness of the city, the rampant alien vigour. The glittering shop windows, chain stores, coffee shops, waterfront apartments, architectural flourishes, tourist trails and heritage points seem imported from the bland, paved and lacklustre England that has ignored the city for so long. The modernisation seems processed and giftwrapped and liable to rub away the urgent, chaotic but ultimately grand and unifying elements that have made Liverpool so different, so aggressively outside, a place that helped make England, and Britain, and Europe, a better, stranger, lovelier and more hopeful place than it might otherwise have been. The refurbishment seems not to have come from its people, its thriving, maddening history, its fundamental commitment to invention and innovation, but to have been merely dropped in place, as ordered by glib, dreamless business, as designed by faceless committee.

This alluring, cheerless invasion of the artificially manufactured now is just the latest threat to a city that has become what it is because of its ability to somehow survive any direct or indirect attempts to undermine its natural resilience. The regeneration is not representing, except superficially, its radical, pioneering nature, the way it changed with the times – sometimes by being the place where those changes happened first. The rebuilding and cleaning up is all second-hand and selective, borrowed from other regions and redevelopments, but Liverpool’s battling, roguish history suggests that its radicalism will not be destroyed. Uniquely capable of somehow acting collectively to represent an inner will, a common appetite, it will find other ways to maintain the aura of otherness and togetherness that is at the heart of its edgy, scandalous specialness.

The person who asked me about Liverpool wanted a soundbite for a radio show and was looking for something a little more concise, they said. Their hopeful look hinted that they’d like me to have another go at what I thought about Liverpool, its history, people, art, music, museums, shops, its past, present, future, its frontier ability to embrace change, its slick, 21st-century transformation, the changing nature of its reputation over the years, the influence it’s had on the way pop culture has colonised large parts of the modern world, its outsider status, sentimental tendencies, wild enthusiasm, contrary cockiness, how the Cavern became Eric’s became Cream, how the Beatles became Frankie Goes To Hollywood became Liverpool FC, did the Beatles make the city or turn it into a theme-park version of itself, the change between Ringo’s springy, uplifting Lancashire accent and the shrill, inbred post-Brookside chancer accent, the annoyance people felt about its self-pity at the end of the 20th century, its comeback as a city with fashionable eccentric celebrity status, its ability to absorb disparate influences, its awkward position as a promiscuous, cosmopolitan, avant-garde place tucked inside a conservative, suspicious nation…

I wondered if everything I had to say, the first things that leapt into my mind, could be compressed into a single sentence, a tidy thought, snipped to broadcasting size for comfortable consumption.

Extracted from Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool & the Avant-garde, published by Liverpool University Press and available from Books First, priced £25, free p&p, on 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst