To Nottingham, to give the first Graham Greene Memorial Lecture. I don't give many lectures these days, but David Belbin, head of the MA in Creative Writing at Trent Uni-versity, enticed me by invoking Greene's connections with Nottingham. Greene spent four months here in 1925, at the age of 21, learning the craft of sub-editing as an intern on the Nottingham Journal.

It was the furthest north he had ever been, his first experience of a predominantly working-class industrial city, and he didn't much like it. "There's absolutely nothing worth doing in this beastly place," he wrote to his fiancée Vivien in Oxford. "No excitement, no interest, nothing worth a halfpenny curse." But the screenwriter Michael Eaton, a Nottingham man, argues it was here that

the novelist discovered "Greeneland", that gloomy, seedy country of the mind where most of his stories unfold. One of Greene's best "Entertainments", A Gun For Sale, is set in Nottingham, as is his play The Potting Shed. Mike and David show me the outside of 2 All Saints Terrace, where Greene had lodgings, and which served as the model for many dingy and disreputable houses in his work. There is no plaque.

Greene arrived in Nottingham as an atheist with an Anglican background and left as a Roman Catholic. To please his devoutly Catholic fiancée, he took instructions at the cathedral of St Barnabas from the happily named Fr Trollope, a former actor who had a knack of making converts. Greene was one of 150 he received into the Church in ten years. Visiting the cathedral, I am struck by its similarity to the Catholic cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham, where I live, and not surprised to discover that like St Chad's it was the work of Pugin, or that the architect considered it one of his finest buildings: it is a gem, and beautifully maintained.

One tends to think of Nottingham as being to the East Midlands as Birmingham is to the West Midlands, but they are very different. Birmingham is four times larger and the surrounding conurbation sprawls as far as Wolverhampton. Nottingham is much more compact - you can see open country from hills near the city centre - and architecturally more low-profile, more intimate and more old-fashioned. The Victorian railway station reminds me of Birmingham's Snow Hill when I arrived there 40-odd years ago, before it was rebuilt in a soulless modern style. Nottingham feels like a well-balanced urban environment, and the people I meet like living there. All the more surprising, then, that it is declared "crime capital" of England in a survey reported on the day of my visit, whereas Birmingham comes out rather well. The council leader questions the statistical basis of the survey, and the people I speak to think it paints an exaggerated picture, but nobody can give me a convincing explanation for what is an alarming phenomenon. It's a challenge waiting for some sociologist to take up.

The venue for my lecture is the grand Victorian Arkwright Building, formerly the Nottingham University College where D H Lawrence studied to be a teacher, and now part of Trent, one of the largest of the new universities. The MA in Creative Writing, though lacking the glamour of East Anglia's famous course, is thriving. When I started out as a university teacher in 1960 there were no such courses in Britain, and their ubiquity in the US was sneered at by our academic and literary establishments. Now most British universities offer them, and a National Academy of Writing is due to open in Birmingham next year. There are several reasons why universities have changed their attitude: the replacement of the old finals exams by a modular course system; the transformation of higher education into a buyer's market; and, perhaps, a reaction against the aridity of much academic criticism and theory. It is noticeable how many emerging novelists have taken such courses, and how many writers support themselves by teaching them. It's a significant development that is changing our literary culture in ways yet to be measured and analysed.

David Lodge's The Year of Henry James: the story of a novel; with other essays on the genesis, composition and reception of literary fiction is published this week by Harvill Secker