Beside the new, three-storey brick terraces, above, off Leytonstone High Road yesterday John Prescott found his model community. The deputy prime minister sees the Cathall Road estate, in north east London, as the perfect example of neighbourhood revival.

In an area where unemployment soared above 30% eight years ago - and crime drove many people away - it combines new houses with new jobs, training schemes and health programmes to improve the lives of tenants.

"This place was past it," Steve Willer, one of four tenants on the board of the local housing action trust, tells Mr Prescott as he strolls from the Mad Hatter's cyber cafe, which doubles as an IT training centre, to a swish community centre. "I had no work and then they gave me the chance to retrain (in the estate's construction training centre) and learn bricklaying and now I'm a site agent."

"See, that shows what can be done," says Mr Prescott. He stresses that money alone is not the answer to estate regeneration. But the rebuilding of Cathall Road, and three other estates making up Waltham Forest housing action trust, has not come cheaply. Launched in 1992, ironically by the last government, it will have cost around £230m by 2002 when the trust is wound up. Tenants claim credit for many changes. They campaigned for the demolition of system built blocks, and eventually the government transferred 2,400 council homes to a new trust. Over 1,000 have since been demolished. Soon they will be replaced with over 1,500 new houses and flats.

Mike Wilson, the trust's chief executive, points to new shops, a business skills centre, an estate cleaning company and even an alernative medicine clinic . Through re-training programmes, 1,200 locals have found new jobs. Unemployment has more than halved and crime fallen dramatically. He accepts that problems elsewhere are more intractable. London's booming economy can offer jobs on the doorstep. "In some parts of northern England where there is not the same employment base it must be very difficult."