Fifty years after the Free Photographic Omnibus. Driving over ten thousand miles in a double-decker bus, Meadows — then twenty-one — spent fourteen months mapping the length and breadth of England, making free portraits of the people he met.

“This country is changing quickly… we might soon forget those interesting relics of the past that are disappearing under the redevelopment of the future.” That future is now here. He worked mostly on instinct, and many of his do-it-yourself techniques anticipate what documentary media would do in the decades that followed: he remembers sewing a tape recorder into an old tweed jacket so that he could shoot and record sound at once. The bus, a low-bridge decker from Barton Transport, cost him three hundred and sixty pounds. His subjects collected their free portraits the following day, after he had spent restless hours developing and printing in the makeshift darkroom on board.

The volume gives the stories behind the pictures — battles with angry parking attendants, nights of acute loneliness, moments of joy — mixing images, diary entries and audio transcripts. In Southampton in 1974 he met Florence, a part-time cleaner with whom he stayed close for five decades, eventually speaking at her funeral.