A return ticket to Larkin

John had spotted him around the city once or twice, and now here he was, alarmingly close, large as life and twice as bald. As Larkin stood up to get off the bus, he dropped his ticket. John picked it up, took it home and framed it, like a precious relic of a medieval saint. A framed bus ticket... how very, well, Larkinesque.

Plenty of stories of that sort will told this year, the 25th anniversary of the poet's death. It's being marked in Hull by Larkin 25, an ambitious festival of his life and work, due to be launched in June. Over 25 weeks, it will feature Larkin's poems, photographs, cartoons, duffel coat and long johns.

The climax will come on December 2, the exact anniversary, when – if all goes according to plan – a statue of the man will be unveiled at the city's Paragon Station, the starting point of The Whitsun Weddings, his most celebrated poem (rather than his most notorious one, This Be the Verse, which opens with the much-asterisked line "They **** you up, your mum and dad").

Larkin, the high priest of provincial melancholy, knew the station well. He once wrote: "When your train comes to rest in Paragon Station, against a row of docile buffers, you alight with an end-of-the-line sense of freedom... People are slow to leave (Hull), quick to return.

"And there are others who come, as they think, for a year or two, and stay a lifetime, sensing that they have found a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance."

Larkin himself stayed in Hull for 30 years, and another who has followed his example is Graham Chesters, Emeritus Professor of French at the university and chairman of Larkin 25's steering committee. He arrived in 1972 as a young lecturer and has many memories of the poet.

He recalls his first meal at the university: "I made the mistake of sitting at a table in the staff dining room that was unspokenly reserved for senior staff. Larkin came to sit opposite me and, thinking back, it was probably part of his shyness that he didn't tell me that I was sitting in a seat that was effectively reserved for someone else. Later, my room overlooked the postbox and I remember him going to post his personal letters. He had the slight stoop that tall people sometimes have."

Larkin's personal letters will play their part in the year's festivities. Those to Monica Jones, his companion, are due to be published in September, and his niece has given the university 2,500 letters he sent to his parents over almost 40 years. Beyond that, a Larkin trail around Hull is being devised and there will be exhibitions (including the long johns), CDs of his favourite jazz tracks, lectures and, with a nice hint of the bizarre, a community project siting fibreglass toads – Larkin's symbols of oppressive work – around the city.

"And we've recently unearthed films from the 1960s by Alan Marshall, a university photographer who used to make them to show at the annual library Christmas party," says Graham Chesters. "Larkin makes a vignette appearance in one. He always struck me as being serious, until he got into a convivial situation, and then he became very good company."

True enough. Former colleagues recall him doing the hokey-cokey round the library stacks, which is a bit like imagining TS Eliot tap-dancing.

On a slate-grey Hull day, Chesters and I have met in the broad lounge of Hull's Royal Hotel, where Larkin would arrange to meet visitors and have a drink after city-centre functions. In a 1966 poem, he evoked a quiet Friday night there, with "silence laid like a carpet", and it wouldn't be hard to imagine him loping in today, to sit among the pillars and the palms and note the goings-on like a wry tortoise.

Chesters now lives round the corner from Larkin's last home, a house in Newland Park that the poet called the ugliest in Hull. Away from the top-floor flat where he had spent 17 happily morose years watching the world far below, he now found himself in comparative suburbia, distracted by central heating breakdowns and lawns that needed mowing.

His creativity suffered. Chesters recalls: "He said that it took 20 years for people to realise that he was writing and he thought it would take another 20 before they realised he had stopped."

The house's current owner, Miriam Porter, has smartened it up spectacularly and regularly entertains the Philip Larkin Society to garden parties and soires. Three years ago, on a hot July afternoon, I went along to one of the parties, where Larkinites in panama hats sipped Pimm's and nibbled strawberries as a harpist plucked pleasant tunes.

Mrs Porter gave me a tour of the house and pointed out the shelves where she had found Larkin's old shoes. "All stacked up there," she said. "Size 12." Monica Jones stayed on in the house until her own death in 2001, with his suits, shaving brushes and an estimated 150 ties left pretty much where they were. Graham Chesters points out that it was on the far curve of a crescent, "like Hull, on the edge of things; people wouldn't go past".

Back to the statue. The idea, says Chesters, is to reflect Larkin the traveller, making his journeys to and from Hull. "The challenge for the sculptors is to capture Larkin's two roles – as poet and as librarian, with his suit and fobwatch. We've all got fixed images in our minds. I like the idea of him walking with his briefcase on his way to the train to London. Or perhaps on his bike: he would catch the local train when he was going cycling in the country."

Three sculptors are competing for the commission, which it's hoped will be funded by an 80,000 public appeal: Martin Jennings, who created the statue of Larkin's old friend John Betjeman atLondon's St Pancras station; Jemma Pearson, who has sculpted Elgar and Darwin; and Graham Ibbeson, whose many commissions include the joyous "skipping" statue of Eric Morecambe on Morecambe prom.

They all have good track records with English icons, I say, and the conversation turns to Englishness as a clue to Larkin's appeal – "whether it's an annoying Englishness or an Englishness that you can recognise as being a part of yourself". And the poetry's appeal to him? "It's the careful vocabulary, the particularity, the readability, his gift of capturing a common experience in a memorable phrase."

Some of those memorable phrases, from The Whitsun Weddings, may be included on the statue's plinth. And as the poem describes a journey from Hull to London, why not continue it at major stops on the way – a few lines at Doncaster, a few more at Grantham, a stanza or two at Peterborough?

Larkin 25 is a joint project between the university, Hull City Council, Visit Hull and East Yorkshire, and the Philip Larkin Society. Part of the aim is to improve Hull's image.

"The impression people from outside have is that it's an unprepossessing city. We want to try to subvert that."

But surely Larkin himself must bear some of the blame, with his unflattering description of Hull as "a place where only salesmen and relations come"?

"The poems are set in the 1950s and 1960s, so they are period pieces and for that reason they have their own charm. It's a Hull that isn't really here any more."

Nor is all of the rest of Larkin's England here any more.

On the way home, I call in at the stylishly restored Edwardian buffet on Sheffield's Midland Station.

A few weeks ago, a reader wrote to the Sheffield Telegraph pointing out that it could be featured in Larkin's poem Dockery and Son.

On the way back to Hull from Oxford in 1963, the poet woke from a doze at "the fumes and furnace-glares of Sheffield", where he changed trains "and ate an awful pie".

Was this the buffet where he ate it? the reader wondered.

Paul Walker, a member of the Larkin Society, wrote to say it couldn't have been. In 1963, trains from Oxford to Hull would have used Sheffield's now-demolished Victoria Station.

There, he said, would have been the buffet to blame for the awful pie.

Again, how very, well, Larkinesque...

Philip Larkin Society: for more details see www.philiplarkin.com. Larkin 25, details are available at www.larkin25. co.uk.