If knocking pack a pint in a subterranean Victorian urinal doesn’t sound like a good time to you, read on. Extensive renovations have transformed the most unlikely of settings into quirky and often beautiful places to have a drink, from dumpsters and sheds to historic bank vaults and gothic churches.

The Temple: Victorian Urinal Pub

Once dark, dingy and far from sanitary, a subterranean Victorian urinal is now a popular pub in Manchester, UK. One of the city’s smallest bars, the Temple nevertheless offers a vast array of foreign bottled beers. Meanwhile, in London, a urinal from the same era has now become an eatery after a $150,000 renovation.

Oran Mor Church Pub

Europe is brimming with former places of worship that have since been converted into private residences, hotels and more due to an overabundance of churches that just don’t draw the same crowds that they used to. The Oran Mor in Glasgow, Scotland is just one (particularly stunning) example, which has become one of the nation’s hottest nightspots after a major renovation that includes trippy murals painted all over the ceilings. This may remind some visit of the cultre of a Bratislava night if they ever went on a Bratislava stag do.

Woodhenge Shed Pub

It’s not hard to see why John Plumridge’s handmade backyard structure won Shed of the Year in 2012. After all, not many sheds are lined with hundreds of bottles of ale. Plumridge spent 4 years converting his Woodhenge Pub Shed into “a great venue for family and friends to party in.”

Dumpster Bar

Urban waste and a dumpster became a tiny, charming bar as part of the Foundation Projects by designers Rikkert Paauw and Jet van Zweiten. This adaptive reuse project shapes found materials into little dumpster houses that have practical purposes throughout the cities in which they’re built.

1926 Bank Vault, Chicago

A beautiful 1926 bank vault in Chicago with many of its historic features still intact – including that incredible door – is now known as The Bedford, a local kitchen and bar serving food and cocktails in a signature mix of German and Southern cuisine.

Hop On Inn: Double Decker Bus Pub

Named for its hop-on, hop-off rear platform, the Hop On Inn is a renovated 1966 London double-decker bus that now hosts a full bar downstairs and a lounge area upstairs complete with a stage and removable roof cover for live music. The bus, which once served Piccadilly Circus, is among the last classic Routemasters that were taken out of service in 2005.

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Giant receptacles for trash have been transformed into the most unexpected things – swimming pools, bars, giant pinhole cameras, and now tiny ‘living containers’ on wheels. German designer Philipp Stingl envisions a future in which the growing elderly population requires cheap and portable housing, and these lockable rolling dumpsters would certainly fit the bill.

The set of ‘housing containers’ includes a larger yellow dumpster with a door, window and a drinking canister; the top opens like a normal dumpster and has a net in the lid for storage. The second unit is smaller, meant to be used as a bath tub.

The designer created these containers for a rather bleak future in which social systems collapse and “from the ashes an aging society will rise, marked by crime, sickness and poverty.”

One can only imagine that Stingl is being satirical when he states, “Essentially, these ‘living containers’ testify to an active and creative lifestyle for the old age without compromises.” It’s hard to ignore the implications of placing the homeless and elderly in trash containers. However, this concept isn’t much different from many other economical ideas for homeless housing, which can also be used as emergency shelters in the event of a disaster.

What is trash, really, but materials that certain people decide are no longer useful? Scraps of wood, broken furniture and other piece of so-called junk sitting in a dumpster might seem destined to rot in a landfill, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Dutch designers Rikkert Paauw and Jet van Zwieten of Foundation Projects not only transform that trash into useful building materials – they make the dumpsters themselves the basis of miniature bars and cafes.

The designers transport the dumpsters to urban locations and then fill them with materials that are either sourced from the streets or other dumpsters nearby, or donated by local residents. Using the dumpsters as foundations, they build quirky structures that become community meeting places.

The pair carried out the project at the Vienna Design Week in 2010, the Milan Public Design Festival in 2011 and in their hometown of Utrecht in April 2012, yielding entirely different results each time. One of those structures became a bar called Straatlokaal, which offered breakfast debates, music and speakers from various local districts. The story behind some of the donated materials, like those that came from a renovation or vacant land, was projected onto the buildings at night.

“People from all walks of life will find their way to the project. People that hang out on the streets, but also architects, residents that come to donate materials and people interested in design. One of Foundation’s main goals is to bring people together and inspire dialogue between persons from different backgrounds. Until now, that is exactly what has happened at all previous projects and that is why we will just carry on.”

This is just the latest example of innovative dumpster reuse. A project called TrashCam turned dumpsters into pinhole cameras that were used to capture urban scenes. ‘Skip Conversions’ by Oliver Bishop transformed them into swimming pools, skateboard ramps, gardens and public toilets.

The images are breathtaking: black-and-white urban scenes with all the organic drama and character that only low-tech photography methods can produce. Would you believe that these beautiful photos were taken from inside the grimiest, least glamorous objects that lurk in alleys and on street corners? The ‘Trashcam Project’ transforms dumpsters into traveling pinhole cameras that roll around the city of Hamburg.

Photographers Christoph Blaschke, Mirko Derpmann, Scholz & Friends Berlin and Matthias Hewing teamed up with the Hamburg sanitation department to alter ordinary dumpsters. Drilling tiny holes into the containers, they taped Ilford photo paper to the back wall of the interior. The length of the exposure is calculated based on the strength of the sun or other ambient lighting present in the scene.

The Trashcam Project has produced a rather haunting series of photographs of the city of Hamburg. The images have the typical vignetting, slight light leaks and other imperfections that often come with this photography technique. The single small hole drilled into the dumpster projects an inverted image of the scene outside on the opposite side of the container. The smaller the hole, the sharper the image produced.

As opposed to high-tech photographic innovations, pinhole photography is all about simplicity and unpredictable results. Among the first forms of photography to emerge in the 19th century, it’s based on a concept that has been around since the 5th century BCE. The first lens was added around 1600 CE, and it wasn’t until 1850 when pinhole devices were first used to take photos rather than simply displaying an inverted image inside a box or a room.

See the whole series at the Trashcam Project’s Flickr.