ITS slogan is “one city, many discoveries”. Now Dundee has found a new identity: “Scotland’s renaissance city.”

That’s the accolade which has been bestowed by one of the world’s leading luxury and lifestyle bibles. Conde Nast Traveler has named it as the only Scottish city in its top 10 locations “that are having a particularly storming year”.

It has praised Dundee for its “ascendance as one of the UK’s must-visit cultural destinations” since the opening of its “dramatic” waterfront V&A museum in September. Strangely, they don’t mention the Desperate Dan statue in High Street, but a visit to the city would surely not be complete without an encounter with the famous character from The Dandy.

In its praise of Dundee, the luxury travel magazine also noted the city’s forthcoming design festival, the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre, the planned redevelopment of a former printworks where Beano and Dandy annuals were once made, and a restaurant on the other side of the River Tay in Newport run by Masterchef winner Jamie Scott.

This resurgence and the effect of the V&A have previously won the praise of Lonely Planet, Bloomberg, Vogue, GQ, the Wall Street Journal and National Geographic.

The latest plaudits for the city in Tayside, Scotland’s fourth largest, emerged ahead of the opening yesterday of the £80 million visitor attraction’s second major exhibition, which is dedicated to videogames – apt since Dundee is arguably the centre of the universe when it comes to digital games development.

As the Conde Nast Traveler report points out: “It is casting a spotlight on digital creativity in Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, an exhibition celebrating videogame design from Scotland, an international centre for the field (Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto were both created in Dundee), and around the world.”

The news also comes just days after the city was named the best place to live in Scotland by The Sunday Times.

But it wasn’t always this way. Dundee was once renowned as the city of the three Js – jute, jam and journalism. The jute and the jam – actually, it was Keiller’s marmalade – are long gone, but the journalism lives on with DC Thomson titles such as The Courier, on which I cut my journalistic teeth.

The city was an industrial powerhouse, but with the demise of the jute mills in the 1970s decline was setting in. Multinationals – notably Timex and NCR – kept the economy afloat until financial difficulties in the 1980s and 90s led to closure and huge job losses.

But Dundee fought back. Royal Research Ship Discovery, which was captained by Robert Falcon Scott on his first journey to the Antarctic, was built on the Tay and was returned there in 1988. So began the rebirth of the City of Discovery.

I spent three years in Dundee in the early 1990s. Money was tight and we didn’t stay in one of the more affluent ends of town, but they were happy days.

I’m ashamed to say I haven’t returned to Dundee since the day I left 25 years ago. It sounds like I may notice a few changes. I must plan a voyage of rediscovery.