Book of the Road by Daniel Meadows

Book of the Road celebrates the 50th anniversary of Daniel Meadows’ pioneering 1970s documentary project Free Photographic Omnibus.

Driving over 10,000 miles in a double-decker bus, the wild-haired young Meadows spent 14 months mapping the length and breadth of England, photographing 958 people and offering a free print to each of his subjects. Along the way, amongst countless breakdowns, parking tickets and random acts of kindness, he had chance encounters with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Meadows’ determination allowed him to assemble all this material into a cartographic census of an evolving nation.


The inspiration for the book came from a road atlas: the 1967 edition of The Reader’s Digest AA Book of the Road – which Tom first saw three years previously. It’s a beautiful object and a very recognisable one which people kept in their car glove boxes during the 1960s. Tom presented Daniel with the idea of copying many of the design elements of the original to make our own, and he was totally onboard.

So, stealing the size and shape of the original atlas was the beginning of pulling Daniel’s photographs into a sequence which chronologically follows his journey in the bus over those 14 months. But unlike other books containing this work, there are countless unseen and unpublished photographs included, which are made more vivid and real by transcribed audio diaries which fill in the gaps between images. They also offer great insights into the mindset of Daniel as a young man on the road, trying to document a population at a time of great change.

Bringing this work back into print while honouring Daniel’s original journey was key and out of that was born a book that truly and honestly represents the work in its entirety. A 21-year-old Meadows, a double-decker bus, 14 months of work, 10,000 miles travelled, 150 pictures over 220 pages with six gatefolds, and almost 10,000 words of contemporaneous audio diary extracts: all this is in this book.

Another design element inspired by the original atlas was the use of gatefolds to make navigating the map easier. Using similar gatefolds in Book of the Road in order to present the Now and Then photographs. These are images of people Daniel met on the road, but 25 years later, allowing you to see how they have aged and changed. The original photographs are on the outside of the gatefold layered on top of the ones made 25 years later, so you can switch between the two to notice subtle changes. Accompanying the photographs are heartwarming testimonies from the subjects.