Covid, a contractor collapse, war-driven inflation and the 2022 mini-budget all hit the same 238-home scheme.

In December 2019 we secured £60m to build 238 homes. It was the biggest project of my career, and the plan was clear. Pre-sales would launch in Hong Kong in January 2020, and we had already invested £36,000 in the marketing campaign.

Then Covid closed the border. I wasn’t allowed into Hong Kong, and the launch never happened.

We broke ground in April 2020 regardless. For the next two years we built through lockdowns and supply shortages.

In July 2022 the war in Ukraine sent inflation and steel prices soaring, and our main contractor collapsed mid-build. That is the moment most schemes stall for months, sometimes for good. We had the site open again within three weeks. We set up our own special-purpose contractor and kept every subcontractor in work. Those were people with families and mortgages, and they kept their jobs.

Two months later the September 2022 mini-budget sent interest rates soaring. Our corporate buyer walked away and sterling fell against the euro. Over Christmas our Eastern European workforce went home. In January 2023 we reopened with 51 men on a site that needed more than 120.

We kept going.

In April 2024 the building was completed. Its homes became the first units on Royal London Asset Management’s build-to-rent platform. People live there today.

Finishing it came at a personal cost. While we were fighting to complete, a creditor called in a company loan and my £100,000 personal guarantee with it. I wasn’t in a position to pay. In September 2024, that PG call made me personally bankrupt.

I’m not going to dress that up. It happened, and I’d rather you heard it from me.

I was discharged in September 2025. Looking back, I don’t count the bankruptcy as the failure in this story. The failure would have been an empty, half-built shell with 238 homes that never came to be. Instead, the building stands, the subcontractors were paid to carry on, the lender came out whole, and a major institution chose it to launch its rental platform.

What I took from it is simple. Ambition needs structure that can survive shocks nobody can forecast. Any one of those events could have ended the project. We faced all of them, one after another, and still delivered.

That lesson is built into everything I do now, including Marmalade JAMS.