What would be 'recognisable' features of council housing?
Good room sizes usually in the older ones - up to early '80s. Often quite a cheap finish - as in rendered and the render not painted.
Compared to commercial housing estates of the same age, the council houses tend to be larger, plainer and with a bigger garden compared to the commercial one. There is also usually a standard room layout, that anyone knowing the area would recognise - but that gets altered in owner occupied ones.
Council house estates vary a lot - and since the right to buy scheme came in about 20 years back they vary within estates. Council tenants bought their own house and sometimes have sold them on. So the older the estate, the more people who have sold on, the bigger the variety in terms of how the double glazing has changed, extensions, gardens etc.
Do not assume that all council owned council houses are "run down" - they're not. Sometimes even its the owner occupied ones that look tatty compared to the council ones.
There will be a standard council paint colour - and all council house front doors will be the same colour. Or they were until recently. Now some councils are not sending out painting crews but are instead handing vouchers to their tenants and the tenants are going down DIY stores and picking their own paint.
Most council houses are three bed - not all but most - planned for the classic couple with two or three kids. They won't be detached. They will be either semi-detached or terraced. Most of the council house building was done in the 1950 to 1970s - to start with it was re-building after the bombings in WW2. But there are a few rare cases of pre-war council housing and that can be prettier, especially in a rural area - and in a rural area they might have 60 to 70 or even 100 feet long rear gardens. In fact some post-war council houses can have rear gardens up to 100 feet long - though usually about 50 feet. The theory, and practice, at the time they were built, is that the occupiers would be growing a lot of their own food - so it would have probably had a chicken run plus lots and lots of vegetable patches and fruit trees and maybe a tiny lawn. These days, some such gardens would be rough grass, probably with a chain link fence round it, or mown grass with kiddies toys. Far fewer people grow their own veg. Not impossible to have gardens neat and productive, just less common.
In fact, concrete posts and chain link fences waist high around a property are suggestive of a council house, or former council house. Not a guarantee but suggestive.
Also - most council houses wouldn't have a drive or garage (again not impossible) but they were built in an era when it was less common to own a car, and council tenants were unlikely to have afforded one. Newer council estates mostly have parking areas, sometimes allocated, sometimes not - and the garages tend to be built in blocks rather than next to the house.
They can be a very good buy, ex-council houses, because of the room sizes, the size of the garden and often the road is a more generous width than in a commercial estate.
And finally - some council estates can be non-standard construction - the walls being made of horizontal concrete panels bolted together for example. Those are usually not mortgageable - though they can be rebuilt - the roof held up on scaffolding and blockwork walls built up to meet the roof.
And another thought. The size of the estate can vary a lot - anything from dozen of roads and side turnings, to two or three roads, to half a dozen houses up a cul-de-sac - depends on what plots of land the council could buy. Most estates will include a block of flats as well as houses. Some will also have retirement bungalows which are usually in a terraced or semi-detached, but with a small bungalow you just might get detached. So you could have a side road off a main road with say 10 semi detached houses with bigger gardens on one side, and the garage block plus 10 semi-detached retirement bungalows in smaller gardens facing them.
Some council estates have play areas, some don't. If they do have play areas, nearly all the play equipment will have been removed for safety reasons. Slides and swings are dangerous.....
Oh and as you may have noticed from this thread, quite a lot of UK folks like talking about houses - as well as the weather.
There are a lot of TV programmes about buying houses, doing up houses and also building your dream house. (Property Ladder, Grand Designs for the latter two.)
