The book London Voices London Lives: Notes from a Working Capital, published in summer 2007, has two affinities: written by Michael Young's successor at the Institute of Community Studies, it appeared almost exactly fifty years after Family and Kinship in East London, and it presents the edited raw material of the interviews used in writing the book Working Capital, published in 2002. This paper, based on the 2007 Michael Young Lecture, contains reflections on the use of interview material as sociological evidence, and presents some major themes of the new book. The old working-class communities based on strong kinship ties, a central theme of Family and Kinship, still survive but are under siege as children enter the middle class and leave London, and as their places are taken by immigrants and gentrifiers. In consequence, they are among the few relatively unhappy places in early 21st-century London.