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Accepted Answer
nginx -t is a helpful command to check your configs before a restart/reload
When nginx failed to start it likely included some details on the error it encountered. If they were not then you should be able to find these details in /var/log/nginx/error.log.
By default the config files in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled (and sites-available) should end in .conf - I do not know if this will cause a failure like the one you experienced but it is best practice for nginx configuration files.
Well I guess that was the answer. I noticed while looking at the default server block that the php location block was indeed inside the server block of code. I copied the rest of the default server block code in to my new server block and php is now working. A very important point to add to the Digital Ocean tutorial I used to create my new server block.
I had thought that anything in the default server block would be applied to ALL server blocks. Not so!