"A city for everyone" proclaimed the Argus headline on Tuesday - how right.

It was a people's bid and it was a people's win. In the last couple of days it has been clear how proud so many people feel that we now live in a city.

A woman told me a story yesterday that made me smile. Her family was significant in the early days of the Labour Party in the North-East. She and her husband ran a chippy in South Shields called Hopps. So when the Labour landslide came in 1945, they celebrated.

But, she told me, she'll always remember just the very next day, as people queued for their tea, how she heard some of them mutter "Nothing's changed yet". We need to guard against that kind of cynicism.

I went on the Joanne Good show on the BBC after the announcement. She looked remarkably bright given that nightly she is vindicating the 'good' part of her name in Cinderella at the Theatre Royal.

"What's different this morning?" she asked., "What's the immediate change?" As if, just like in panto, all you have to do is wave a wand and dreams immediately come true.

If we are to make any sense of being a city, the announcement on Monday must be a start and not an end. It was a significant coincidence that two previously planned events followed the decision.

At Brighton University on Monday afternoon there was a significant Creative Industries gathering and on Tuesday, Mo Mowlam came to launch our Begging For Change campaign.

The seminar at the university, which was joined by two Government Ministers Chris Smith and Lord Sainsbury, helped bring together 40 or so key people in what is one of the most important sectors of our economy to plan strategies for growth.

The debate tried to define why it is that, despite there being more companies in the creative sector in Surrey than Sussex, we are thought of as the creative hub.

It is to do with the atmosphere, the sense of individuality and the diversity of the city that makes it such a stimulant to new ideas and therefore new successful companies, from the Body Shop to Skint Records.

The businesses that find a home here are often not significant because of their size but because of their cutting edge feel and innovation.

The jobs come, unlike in Swindon where there are so many corporate HQs in a high number of pretty small businesses.

Our quality of life and our diversity are the keys to our economic success. However, we are not yet fulfilling our potential.

Hence the need to plan for growth and for people in businesses and creative organisations to aspire to making their companies world class and not be satisfied with, however successfully, just making it locally.

The city award will help to turn that into a reality. The task ahead is not just about enhancing our achievements, but also about tackling our problems.

On Tuesday, we launched a scheme to encourage people to give to charities to help people off the streets.

The Place to Be brought together a group of traders, homelessness charities, the police, the council and others to give us all an effective alternative to giving money to people on the street, where so often it ends up being spent on drugs and alcohol. You'll see the boxes in shops and restaurants around town.

Mo Mowlam and I visited a detox programme in the morning and listened to brave people who were successfully going clean.

Then in St James's Street, a notorious centre of street problems, we gathered at The Tin Drum to launch the campaign.

We asked MPs, Lord Bassam, the council, other traders and those providing the services to come and pool their efforts in tackling this dreadful problem of begging and homelessness.

Everybody agreed the solution is not just about isolating begging. It's about making the streets of our city safe, clean and attractive.

That's as much about not dropping litter, peeing in doorways or fighting on a Saturday night as it is about not begging. A big task.

To make sense of the city and to grab the opportunity the honour has given us, will take time.

If you doubt that, in a couple of years time pop along to the new library in Jubilee Street and read the history books yourself. The new CITY library, that is.