The housing crisis in London calls for re-thinking the role architectural heritage listing plays in the debate of demolition vs refurbishment of social housing. My research aims to develop a new critical methodology for conservation and architectural heritage practices, through the medium of the graphic novel. My architectural case study is the East London housing estate Robin Hood Gardens (1972), which was refused heritage listing in 2009 and 2015 and is currently undergoing demolition as part of a wider local regeneration scheme. The proposed methodology draws on my own practice as an illustrator in publishing. My graphic novel will critically re-work the historic, material and temporal literary form of the Book of Hours, late medieval illuminated manuscripts, where the time of the telling is combined with the time of the told. This reworking allows the medium itself to become a starting point for rethinking, through images and words, the processes and temporality of conservation, and heritage, through new processes of engaging with and communicating to my audience - government bodies, architects and residents - processes often disregarded in conventional practices. In this paper I present work across the four folios of my PhD research, bringing together archival historical research, ethnographic on-site practice and illustration/book design. Each folio addresses a different temporality of Robin Hood Gardens through techniques specific to the sites of research. Among these are a picture book telling the architectural history of Robin Hood Gardens in the course of a day using montage technique - following the architects, Alison and Peter Smithson's way of working - and twelve graphic novels for each calendar month documenting through reportage drawing the lived time of Robin Hood Gardens as it undergoes demolition during the years of my PhD.
