jats:titleABSTRACT</jats:title>jats:pThis article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book jats:italicFamily and kinship in East London.</jats:italic> These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful jats:italica priori</jats:italic> models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than jats:italicFamily and kinship</jats:italic> would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.</jats:p>