Given what's happening with shares, the Stock Exchange in London wasn't maybe the best place for Sheffield to unveil its new economic masterplan yesterday.
But hindsight is a wonderful thing. Looking ahead is the old Steel City's preferred option, and its vision of the future is rosy indeed.
Is it also a trick of rose-tinted spectacles? Where's the evidence that Sheffield can attract 30,000 new jobs in the next five years, let alone create a new triangular super-city with Manchester and Leeds? Sceptics tend to give short shrift to such dreamings, but the optimism has more than the usual foundations in this case.
Sheffield was almost written off as an economic centre in the public mind after the 1960s collapse of steel employment. Far too dependent on the one industry, the city saw 50,000 jobs go and it was a miserable place for at least the next two decades. But steel production, as opposed to employment, was much less drastically affected. Behind the distressing foreground of families out of work and spending in a slump, the economic background was sound.
Revival eventually comes in such circumstances, and the very level of deprivation helped, with South Yorkshire getting Category 1 aid from the EU which paid for some bold projects. Regeneration of the Don Valley combined with Supertram and the private money poured into Meadowhall shopping centre - Xanadu by the M1 flyover - made prosperity visible again.
This has proved a virtuous circle, with the blossed-up city centre (and it is really good, with excellent water features and a marvellous, vaulting modern Winter Gardens) attracting young outsiders. Sheffield city centre has an extraordinarily high proportion of residents in the 20-34 age range: 43% of the whole, compared with a national average of 20%.
The cultural quarter houses some extremely sassy IT companies, with a pronounced tilt towards the music industry which benefits from the strong school of local stars such as Jarvis Cocker and the Arctic Monkeys. When the people behind the new economic plan, such as Ian Bromley, the executive director of the public-private partnership Creative Sheffield, are challenged about dreaming, they can list 73,000 new jobs created in the past decade.
Hi-tech work features very strongly, especially in alliances such as Boeing's research project with Sheffield university which maintains the local skill of testing specialist metals to the limit. The triangular city will take longer, and there is a lot of countryside and Pennine moor between the city and Leeds and Manchester. But liaison groups already exist and if the touted 'supercity' is seen as more of a virtual concept than a physical one - for instance in dividing up manufacturing sectors to be complementary rather than directly competitive - that too may become a reality.
