It was a 1948 Leyland Titan PD1 double-decker, registration JRR 404. I bought it for £360 and, somewhat crudely for my skills were limited and there was never enough money, I repurposed it as my home, gallery and darkroom. Over the next fourteen months I covered 10,000 miles and visited twenty-two villages, towns and cities across England.

Parked up in shopping centres and on high streets I ran free portrait sessions for all-comers, developing their pictures overnight and giving them prints the next day. I photographed 958 people.

Incorporating these portraits with the many reportage photographs I made while on the road, I used the facilities at Manchester Polytechnic (where I was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies) to create a number of regional exhibitions. When the journey was over I pulled these together into one large exhibition that launched at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in October 1975 to coincide with the publication of my first book Living Like This (Arrow).

Two decades later the curator Val Williams revisited my bus pictures. Separating the portraits from the works of reportage, she created National Portraits, Photographs from the 1970s by Daniel Meadows, a book and travelling exhibition (pictured) which opened at Viewpoint, Salford in 1997. It is from Williams's edit that I present the selection here.