There is a particular quality to the central city today that is harder to capture than the headline statistics. Walk down Cashel Street on a Saturday afternoon, or sit on the Terrace at the end of a working week, and you can feel a confidence that simply was not there five years ago.

The temptation, in a city with this much recent history, has always been to chase the next anchor project. Yet much of what has worked over the past two years has been the opposite: smaller-format developments, careful tenancy decisions, and patient operators who have backed the city through the lean years.

Council and central government still have important roles to play, particularly around housing supply, public transport and the long-promised stadium. But the most encouraging signal is how much of the recent momentum has been driven by independent operators and community-led activity rather than top-down master planning.

If there is a lesson here, it is that the work of rebuilding a city centre is rarely glamorous. It is the result of consistent, small decisions, made by hundreds of people who have decided this place is worth their effort. That is a story worth telling.