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The house that’s decorated in beer cans
06.09.2014
02:42 pm
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If you’ve ever wanted an interesting way to recycle all those empty beer cans left after a weekend party, then take a tip from retired bus driver Phil Muspratt, who has clad his house in Hartlepool, England with over 75,000 of them.

Muspratt started collecting beer cans and bottles in 2005, and soon began sticking the empties to the outside of his house. It’s been thirsty work, as for every eight cans there’s a drunken man, for every 150 there’s been a party. At roughly a dollar a can, you could say Mr. Muspratt has added considerable value to his home.

The house has become a tourist attraction, but there are plans to demolish it along with over 70 other houses in the area. A campaign has been started to save the Mr. Muspratt’s art house but going by the lack of activity on the the supporter’s Facebook page, it’s unclear whether “Can House” will survive.

In 2012, first time director Maxy Neil Bianco made a documentary about Phil Muspratt’s endeavors:

The Can House is a piece of contemporary folk art, made by Phil, a man on the margins of society, a man who’s life is in freefall. This is what you come up with when you run out of nothing- the Can House is an act of defiance, a two fingers up to the hand of fate, to a world slowly degenerating and disappearing. It is a memorial to alcoholism and to wasted lives, but it is also an act of creativity that gives Phil"s life a sense of meaning, that helps it make some kind of sense.

Hartlepool is known as the city that supposedly tried and hung a monkey as a spy during the Napoleonic wars in the 1800s (though it has also been suggested this was no ape but a “powder monkey,” the name given to young boys who served on ships of war). The legend of the hanged monkey is still associated with Hartlepool, but perhaps it’s time to move on and have the city associated with something equally bizarre, like Phil Muspratt’s “Can House”?
 
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With thanks to Paul D. Brazill
 
More pictures of ‘Can House’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.09.2014
02:42 pm
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