'I WOKE up when I heard crying. He was kneeling on the road, praying and saying his Hail Marys. He was screaming for help. That kid thought he was going to die because he was taking drugs or something. I thought, 'that poor lad is somebody's son', but nobody was going to help him. The kids round here are all crying out for help. We must do something for them."

A poignant speech, a harrowing image, a sad indictment. It's something which has driven one woman in a campaign to change things.

Doreen Kett has become the guardian angel of the Woodhouse Close estate in Bishop Auckland. She has lived there since 1955 and done her best to fight for its residents, whether by running a mother and toddler group, getting a family a better council house or standing arms outstretched in front of a mob as they try to attack the local drunk.

But the sight of a teenage boy crying alone in the street, in the early hours of the morning, has added fresh urgency to her campaign to lift the estate and the people who live there.

"When I looked out the window and heard that boy crying out for help, I decided I had to do something," she says. The community spirit isn't dead, it's just asleep.

"We need to get the community working together again and bring life back to our estate and help the young and old have a future here," she says. "We cannot drift along as we are at the present time. There is a good community spirit here, 90 per cent of the people are good people, trying to do the best they can, but they need a big boost."

One of the ways she intends to do this is by reviving the estate's carnival, a project she has launched into with earnest with the Woodhouse Close Residents' Action Group. Doreen points out photographs on her wall of the last carnival, held at the church community centre. More than 20 years have passed since then, but she hopes to recreate the scene of smiling crowds on the green again. At the moment the atmosphere on the Wear Valley council estate is one of fear.

Keith Shaw grew up there when it was known as the Bronx. After a brief spell away during the 1980s, he came back and noticed the change.

"I moved back and what a change there was," he says. "I felt threatened on the streets and I'm a grown man. It was the atmosphere."

He is now a member of the small army of mothers, fathers and grandparents trying to do something for young people locally and he has been volunteering at the Auckland Youth and Community Centre for the past 20 years. He is also striving to retrieve the community spirit that has seeped away. The volunteers run after-school clubs, youth groups and football clubs and generally try and keep the children in line, as well as run events for the elderly.

One of his projects was organising a dinner drop-in for pupils from the nearby comprehensive, to keep them off the streets during lunch hour and stop them "getting hassle off the shop keepers". As many as 60 children will file in and pay £1 for a lunch such as pizza and chips.

"These kids get hassle from adults because they hang around in big gangs," he says. "I would like to bring old folks and young folks together so they can mix. If an old person walks along and sees two kids walking behind them they get scared. We want them to get their confidence back. I've seen elderly people run from me, so I cross the road so they don't feel threatened. It's awful. It shouldn't be like that."

Doreen Kett hopes other projects will be kick-started in the area, like the development of a skateboard park or a cyber caf and, as more and more people support the residents' action group, she believes such schemes will be possible.

"There's nothing for that age group of teenagers, to keep them off the streets. If young people are enjoying themselves, they are less likely to take drugs and, if you get them interested in a project and get them to help make things, they'll look after it.

"Things like the after-school club and the church give them a sense of normality. We're trying to be surrogate parents and seeing that they're safe."

Doreen walks down the street where many of her friends lived a year ago. The tidy, well-kept gardens have been replaced with rows of burnt-out, boarded-up homes and overgrown gardens. Doreen claims drug dealing in the street and anti-social behaviour drove people out. Now Wear Valley District Council has no option but to bulldoze the street.

"The community in this street has been driven out in one year," says Doreen. "My friend lived here for 19 years and didn't want to move, but she had to because it was getting dangerous. She was scared for her animals."

Geoff Kelly, assistant director of housing at Wear Valley District Council, says the problems associated with the estate are the same up and down the country; too many houses and not enough people wanting to live in them.

The council is currently running a programme to bulldoze surplus council houses, many of which only attract interest from vandals and arsonists thrilled at the prospect of a derelict house to ransack.

But Doreen feels most of the problems on the estate start when drug dealers or the odd anti-social family sets up home on a previously peaceful street.

"It's easy to make glib statements about putting unsuitable people in council houses, often we have no option," says Mr Kelly. "A person has the right to apply for accommodation and we have to have a justifiable reason to expel them. If you have a family with two or three kids, what happens to them? They don't just go away. The council doesn't just put whoever they want in the house."

Whatever is achieved on the estate, Doreen hopes it will go some way to answering the appeal for help she heard that night, the mournful cries of a community lost.