09/04/2026
Stress Test — Iqbal Latif
This photograph was taken in January 2008. I am standing on a construction site in London, wearing a hard hat, looking at something that did not yet exist but was already underway in my mind. At that exact moment, the world had not yet admitted what was coming, but the financial system had already begun to give way. Liquidity was tightening, banks were uneasy, and within months the crisis would break fully. That is when I chose to build.
There is a moment I remember very clearly. My bank was Lloyds Banking Group. One Friday, they told me there were two cheques to clear. One was mine, the other slightly larger. There was only enough money in the account to clear one. Mine just fit. It went through. Two hours later, Gordon Brown announced the rescue of the banks during the Global Financial Crisis. That is how close things were. Not in theory, not in analysis, but in hours. Life sometimes moves on margins that small.
I kept building. Through 2008, through 2009, when projects across London were stopping, when financing was disappearing, when people who were stronger on paper were stepping back. I did not step back. When you have already started, you don’t wait for the world to become comfortable again. In January 2010, the doors opened. Rafayel Hotel & Spa stood on the Thames, completed in the middle of collapse, not inherited, not acquired, but built. Over time it became something that London itself recognized. Taxi drivers knew it, the river carried it, and it settled into the fabric of the city.
It was also seen beyond London. The Guardian described it as “an ecologically intelligent hotel… exceptionally noteworthy,” and The New York Times wrote about it as part of a new kind of London—one where design, sustainability, and ambition met on the river. At that point, it stopped being just a project. It became something recorded.
Then came a moment that still sounds unreal when I say it plainly. A man drove his car into the basement while it was already burning, thinking it would cool down. Instead, it ignited the space. Fire engines arrived, sirens filled the night, people evacuated, smoke moved through the structure. There are moments when what you have built is no longer protected by planning or intention. It stands on its own. The building stood.
And it did not end there. Another project in Croydon, completed, and then fire again. A separate business with boats, and again fire. Years later, in 2019, another completed project, and again it burned. These are not stories told for effect. They are events that happened. Ten, maybe fifteen times in different forms, life has placed me in situations where something real was at stake and the outcome was uncertain.
People speak about stress as something to avoid, something to manage, something to reduce. I never saw it that way. Stress is where you find out what is real—about a project, about a decision, about yourself. I did not run from it. I accepted it. That is why, after all of this, I can say something very simple: I am a happy man. Not because life was easy, but because I stayed with it when it was not.
When I look at that photograph now, I don’t see the beginning of a project. I see a moment already inside a test. Because the truth is very simple—once you decide to build when the world itself is uncertain, the test has already begun.
Iqbal Latif
