19 Princelet Street in Spitalfields is London's only museum of conscience and Europe's first and only museum of immigration and diversity. The building is an extraordinary 'found object'. A Grade II* historic building, this unrestored 1719 Huguenot silk merchant's home also conceals a tiny synagogue of 1869.

19 Princelet Street opens briefly in 2004, as the debate on Britishness deepens. Inside this visible symbol of Britain's diversity, the acclaimed exhibition Suitcases and Sanctuary widens awareness of the centuries of incomers - Asian, Caribbean, Jewish, Irish, Huguenot among many others - to Spitalfields and London, who have shaped (and are shaping) British society.

Suitcases and Sanctuary is made in poetry, prose - and even potatoes - by local primary school children working in 19 Princelet Street with artists, photographers and historians to explore stories of immigration over centuries. Is Britain truly a country of settlement? Why for centuries have people left their homes to come here? What did they bring, and what did they leave behind?

Suitcases and Sanctuary asks you to pause and wonder what you would pack if you were leaving home, for ever? What could make you leave home for a strange new country?

3 artists from leave to remain - artists who are themselves refugees - provide some answers, and challenge some misconceptions. Leave to Remain is a testament to the complex, difficult and extraordinary experience of exile.

This place is for everyone. People who have recently arrived, people who are excluded, people who want a more inclusive society. It is a place to celebrate diversity, to meet, and to use an understanding of the past to build a better future. It is the first of its kind in Europe.

Susie Symes, chair of the project says: 'This is our shared history as Londoners, as British people. The children show us, through fresh young eyes, how so many cultures and peoples have enriched life in our area and in British society'.

ABOUT 19 PRINCELET STREET

Spitalfields - literally 'on the edge' of the City of London - has been a home and sanctuary to incomers since the Romans. The history of Spitalfields is the history of its immigrants: successive waves of peoples who brought new skills, new attitudes, new cultures and new foods; peoples who over the past millennium shaped multicultural Britain for the 21st century.

The Spitalfields Centre charity is working to preserve 19 Princelet Street, a unique and extremely fragile Grade II* building, as a new museum of immigration. One of the first families to live at 19 Princelet Street was that of Peter Abraham Ogier, one of some 50,000 Huguenots who fled for their lives from persecution in France, bringing the word "refugee" into the English language. This pattern of settlement, repeated by many communities over the centuries, is woven into the stories celebrated at 19 Princelet Street.

The building is now closed because of lack of money for repairs and to support its educational work with children, students and many socially excluded groups. The charity needs £3 million to save the site, and open it to the public in about 4 years.

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