The Dickson House Cultural Centre, Kuwait City
The British Political Agency in Kuwait was based in a house that had been built in 1870 for a Kuwaiti merchant. The Dicksons moved in to the house in 1929, and the building served as the British political agency until 1935. Harold Dickson continued to live there until his death in 1959, and Violet until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when she was evacuated, unwillingly, to Britain. She intended to return to her home in Kuwait City, but died on 4 January 1991, some eight weeks before the liberation of Kuwait on 27 February. She was 94.
The house was ransacked during the invasion, but has since been restored by the Kuwaiti National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, and is now a tourist attraction. It is one of few surviving examples of 19th-century Kuwaiti architecture, with thirty rooms on two floors.
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