One immigration museum need not rule out another, as Susanna Rustin’s otherwise interesting piece (Beyond the barbed wire, G2, 5 August) suggests. New York has two very different, and wonderful, immigration museums: Ellis Island, and the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, which already has its equivalent in 19 Princelet Street, in London’s East End. After its £20m refurbishment, the superb Museum of London galleries, not mentioned in your article, tell a powerful story of migration and movement that matches Ellis Island.
The article sadly fails to mention that 19 Princelet Street, London’s only International Historic Site of Conscience, has been doing immigration and identity-focused educational work for more than 15 years. It has welcomed hundreds of school and university groups, from around Britain, Europe and the US, and thousands of individual visitors. That New York University itself regularly brings students here is a powerful endorsement.
London, like New York, is one of the world’s most economically successful cities. So it is shortsighted to conclude that “either the Migration Museum Project or 19 Princelet Street can raise the funds and realise their ambitions”.
New York has funded both Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum. Surely London has the wherewithal to support both the established and much-loved 19 Princelet Street and a possible new museum.
Philip Black
Advisory Board, 19 Princelet Street
• If anyone needs a model museum of immigration then can I suggest looking towards Antwerp. The Red Star Line museum is exemplary, dealing with waves of inward- and outward-going passengers as well as setting that history against a brilliant evocation of international migration which is bang up to date.
Gillian Darley
London
