Photo Composition - Good use of old news

Richard Branson is in this house. He's staring down at you from the ceiling when you walk in. So is Harry Redknapp, the manager of Premier League football team Portsmouth. He's on the ceiling too, opposite Branson, looking florid and slightly weather-beaten. Madonna's probably in here somewhere too, along with Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, a soldier in Iraq, some elephants, Kofi Annan, a London bus and anyone - or thing - else you might care to imagine.

These well-known images are just some of the fragments - along with thousands of other pictures, words, headlines, bylines and captions - that went into the making of the Newspaper House, a public art installation constructed entirely of London's discarded newspapers.

The five-metre tall house, conceived, designed and built by Turkish-Cypriot artist and London resident Sumer Erek, is meant to draw attention to issues like recycling and waste - something Londoners are becoming more familiar with as they wade through the thousands of newspapers scattered across the city's transport network.

"It wouldn't be an exaggerating to say it's constructed with millions of words," says Erek. "There are lots of stories here but you won't be able to read any of them. This work shows that with belief you can transform an unvalued material to make it very valuable; you can transform paper that has no strength or substance in a physical sense into a solid building material."

Nine and half tones of free newspapers are discarded on the tube alone each day. Metronet, the firm that runs the bulk of London's train and tube lines, recycles approximately 25 tonnes of paper each week.

Volunteers collected approximately 10,000 of the papers from London's streets to help build the house while tube and train companies donated two tonnes of paper collected from the transport network.

In all, the house - which was positioned in the middle of Gillet Square in Hackney, East London from March 3-9 - consisted of some 120,000 newspapers, rolled into sticks and folded into logs. The 'logs' and 'sticks' were packed around a timber frame, which was then removed, allowing the house to stand - quite solidly - on its own.

"One of the questions we had was 'Would it stand through the rain?'" said Erek. "Well, yes it did. In fact it solidified."

It sure beats using yesterday's news to wrap your fish and chips in.