I remember both my sets of grandparents who lived in very nice council semis, which were desirable at the time, large bedrooms, indoor bathrooms, dining and living rooms. On nicely laid out estates, plenty of green space, calm roads where kids played outside, people came down to their gates. They had front and back gardens and outbuildings. That would have been the late 70s/early 80s. It possibly was fairly idyllic. I spent most of my childhood with my paternal grandparents in one of those houses (I got the small bedroom, of course, my sister the large). There's a possibility there's still a yellow collection of surreptitiously secreted page 3s liberated from their daily copy of the The Sun at the back of the front room's wardrobe (yes, there was storage space). My other grandparents had an entire storage room.
At the time, my parents lived in falling down house with no indoor plumbing, no toilet, at the edge of a traveller encampment. It did eventually get condemned by the council and through some mechanism it got improved and we, ta-da, had a bathroom and a toilet that wasn't on the other side of a neighbour's garden, behind the angry dog. So then we moved to a more modern 1977 terrace on an estate. It was pretty small then (still is, my parents still live there) but decent. It would have been nice if it had central heating (the council houses got that in the late 70s). I think it was about 1984 that we were finally prised from our much fought-over spaces in front of the gas fire.
I did have a wander around that council estate about a year back. The houses are still there. Most of them seem to have been attacked by some kind of poorly thought-out home improvement scheme (what seriously was wrong with red brick?), gardens have been tarmacked, there's cars and bins scattered everywhere, the few remaining open spaces are scrub (most of them have had small houses squeezed on, including all the garages where I had my formative experiences with a 2 litre bottle of Woodpecker), and generally everything looked scrappy, dirty, and neglected. It looked exactly like what you'd expect a modern stereotype of a council estate to look.
