What if I told you that Kuwait is the cousin of Crawley and that Doha is the sibling of Milton Keynes? There is an Orwellian memory-hole in the architecture community, and it relates to 20th century western design and planning in the Arabian peninsula.

Books and exhibitions on modern and Modernist city planning typically discuss famous case studies such as the City Beautiful movement, Garden Cities, Ville Radieuse, the New Towns Act of 1946, and the Voisin Plan. They may also discuss neighbourhood planning projects based on Modernist principles such as Karl-Marx-Hof, Pruitt-Igoe, the Barbican, the Bijlmermeer, etc. But the Arabian peninsula figures neither in the discussion of British New Towns, nor in discussions of Modernism, nor British colonial architecture. It is glaringly absent.

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