BALTIMORE (AP) — Cyclist Barnaby Wickham has collected more than 700 lost hubcaps, mostly on bike rides around Baltimore. They have inspired a quest to turn litter into art, including Christmas wreaths, a giant fish and a large head of Snoopy.
It is a hobby that developed nearly two years ago from his love of cycling and the joy of making something out of the junk he has collected.
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Cyclist Barnaby Wickham sorts through his collection of hubcaps stored in his garage, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, at his home in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
With hubcaps fastened to his backpack, cyclist Barnaby Wickham pedals through a neighborhood on his journey home, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham steps down and dismounts his bike after spotting a lost hubcap on the side of the road, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham mounts his bike before riding off to collect lost hubcaps, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham poses for a portrait in front of his art structure made from hubcaps, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, at his home in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
“I think it’s sort of the excitement of the hunt, for one thing," Wickham said. "I love to cycle. I love Baltimore. I love to go out in Baltimore, and there’s just enough hubcaps and other things like car grills to be interesting, but not so many that it’s too easy.”
Wickham, 54, says he can't quite explain it, but one day while cycling in early 2024 he decided to bring home a lost hubcap. Since then, he has started stringing hubcaps he comes across to his backpack.
“I keep track of them, and I have a Google map," he said. "I pin locations where I find each of them.”
Others in his community who have taken an interest in his projects let him know when they see hubcaps by the road. Now, Wickham keeps a list of them that he refers to as “hubcaps in the wild.”
He wants to do the collecting himself. That is part of the joy.
Wickham also gets a hand from his wife, Kate, who helps hold materials during construction and offers opinions.
“I’m just support team, and occasionally the cautious person who says, you can’t drive on this road, you can’t bike on this road or whatever. So I’m just more kind of supporting his love of trying new things,” she said.
It might seem like an odd pastime, but Baltimore has been known to celebrate its quirky side. The city is known for director John Waters, whose offbeat films earned him the moniker of the “Pope of Trash.” Baltimore is also home to the American Visionary Art Museum, which is nationally recognized as a repository for the work of self-taught artists and intuitive art.
Wickham, who works in marketing for a defense technology company, stores his finds in his garage and works in his front yard. He uses expanded metal as a framework, with sheet metal with holes and wiring to hold the sheets in place. He uses zip ties to link the hubcaps on the sheet metal.
“It’s all held together with zip ties," he said. "Hubcaps are filled with slots or holes, and so it’s easy to get a hold of them to hold them in place.”
His works are big. The head of Snoopy is 16 feet (4.9 meters) tall and about 21 feet (6.4 meters) wide.
While most of the hubcaps he uses were found in Baltimore, Wickham expands his range when he travels. Visits to see his son at Kent State University have added a few hubcaps with Ohio origins. A business trip to Italy, which included a bike tour in Rome, yielded a find. Wickham had to explain to his guide why he bothered to pick it up.
“And I was like, oh, I collect these. I’m just going to take this back with me. And I showed her a photo of the wreath, and she was like: ‘Oh, OK.’ Whenever anyone hears about it and understands it, they’re onboard," Wickham said.
Wickham donated two Christmas wreaths he made last year, one to the city and another to a nonprofit.
Wickham said the hobby has led to interactions with city residents. On one ride, a man who saw him pick up a hubcap, insistently signaled for him to come over to him. He wanted to let him know there was another hubcap nearby.
“It was clear to him that I was collecting these things, and all he wanted to do was help, to point one out for me. And there’s a lot of that,” Wickham said.
“It starts a lot of conversations, and it’s just something that people love to talk about," he said.
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham sorts through his collection of hubcaps stored in his garage, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, at his home in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
With hubcaps fastened to his backpack, cyclist Barnaby Wickham pedals through a neighborhood on his journey home, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham steps down and dismounts his bike after spotting a lost hubcap on the side of the road, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham mounts his bike before riding off to collect lost hubcaps, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Cyclist Barnaby Wickham poses for a portrait in front of his art structure made from hubcaps, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2025, at his home in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary's Péter Magyar took his oath of office on Saturday to become the country's new prime minister, ending Viktor Orbán's 16 years of autocratic rule.
Magyar’s center-right Tisza party defeated Orbán’s nationalist-populist Fidesz in a stunning blow last month, gaining more votes and seats in Parliament than any other party in Hungary’s post-Communist history.
The win, which gave Tisza a two-thirds parliamentary majority, will allow it to roll back many of the policies that gave Orbán a reputation among his critics as a far-right authoritarian.
In a speech to lawmakers in Hungary's Parliament after being sworn in, Magyar said he would not use his office to “rule” Hungary, “but to serve my homeland.”
“I’m not standing here because I’m different from anyone else in the country,” Magyar said. “I stand here because millions of Hungarians decided that they want change. And this trust that we have received is both a weight of honor and a moral obligation, but also a wonderful feeling.”
Magyar has vowed to restore democratic institutions and governmental checks and balances that were heavily eroded during Orbán's rule, and to clamp down on alleged corruption.
His government is expected to transform political dynamics within the European Union, where the former prime minister had upended the bloc by frequently vetoing key decisions, most recently concerning support for neighboring Ukraine.
On Saturday, Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer who founded Tisza in 2024 after years as an insider in Orbán’s party, entered the sprawling neo-Gothic parliament building alongside 140 of his party representatives.
Tisza now controls 141 seats in Hungary's 199-seat parliament. Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP coalition controls 52 seats, down from 135, while the far-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party holds six seats.
The 199 representatives took their oaths of office at around 11 a.m. local time. Orbán was not among them for the first time since Hungary’s first post-Communist Parliament was formed in 1990.
Magyar earlier called on Hungarians to attend an all-day “regime-change” celebration on Kossuth Square outside Parliament to mark his inauguration and the end of the Orbán era. Thousands had already gathered in the square as the new representatives were sworn in, many waving Hungarian and EU flags and wearing Tisza T-shirts.
As the crowd watched the proceedings inside Parliament on large screens, cheers erupted whenever Magyar appeared. The new prime minister was set to address the crowd outside after the completion of Parliament's inaugural session.
Hungary's new national assembly has 54 women lawmakers, most from the Tisza party — more than a quarter of the total and the most in Hungary’s history.
One attendee, Andrea Szepesi, an economist from Budapest, said it was “about time” that more female lawmakers held seats in Parliament. Under Orbán's rule, there were fewer women in government than in nearly all of the EU's other 26 nations.
“Finally, women are able to participate in this new, beautiful democratic system and the flourishing of the country,” she told The Associated Press.
Magyar has promised to repair his country’s ties with the EU, which Orbán had pushed to a breaking point, and to restore Hungary’s place among Western democracies, whose standing had been called into question as Orbán drifted ever closer to Russia.
The EU flag was raised on the Parliament building’s facade Saturday afternoon for the first time since Orbán’s government removed it in 2014.
Unlocking about 17 billion euros ($20 billion) of EU funds for Hungary frozen during Orbán’s time in office over rule-of-law and corruption concerns is among the incoming prime minister’s top priorities. The money is sorely needed to help jump-start Hungary’s struggling economy, which has stagnated for the past four years.
Another attendee of the celebration, 27-year-old web designer Áron Farsang, said he expects the new Tisza government to restore Hungary's democratic institutions and to “lead us back toward the European Union.”
“I would also really like it if we could get rid of the Russian influence as soon as possible,” he said. “I’m thinking about energy dependency and their general political style.”
Many of the nearly 3.4 million Hungarians that voted for Tisza expect Magyar to hold Fidesz officials and their business allies accountable for the perceived misconduct of the outgoing administration.
Magyar plans to form a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, an authority tasked with investigating and seeking to recover public funds misused during Orbán’s tenure. He’s also vowed to suspend the news services of Hungary’s public broadcaster — widely seen as a mouthpiece of Orbán’s party — until objectivity can be restored.
In his speech to lawmakers Saturday, Magyar referenced his intentions to hold former officials accountable for past abuses, saying voters had “given us a mandate to open a new chapter in Hungary’s history.
“We must understand, however, that there can be no new beginning without reconciliation. There can be no reconciliation without justice. And there can be no justice without confronting the past,” he said.
Hungary's new Prime Minister Peter Magyar leaves the Hungarian Parliament after ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Peter Magyar takes the oath as Hungary's prime minister during a ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Peter Magyar takes the oath as Hungary's prime minister during a ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Peter Magyar takes the oath as Hungary's prime minister during a ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Peter Magyar takes the oath as Hungary's prime minister during a ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
General view of the Hungarian Parliament's main hall during the inauguration ceremony of Prime Minister Peter Magyar in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Peter Magyar smiles before the inauguration ceremony at the Parliament in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Peter Magyar gestures before the inauguration ceremony at the Parliament in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Peter Magyar, center, arrives with fellow lawmakers at the Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
A member of the Hungarian parliament guard wait in the morning before the inauguration ceremony of Prime Minister Peter Magyar in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Members of the Hungarian parliament guard wait in the morning before the inauguration ceremony of Prime Minister Peter Magyar in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Peter Magyar, center, arrives with fellow lawmakers at the Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Peter Magyar, center, arrives with fellow lawmakers at the Parliament building in Budapest, Hungary, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
