Both Meddings' parents had worked in the British film industry: his father as a carpenter at Denham Studios and his mother as producer Alex Korda's secretary and actress Merle Oberon's stand-in.

[4] Meddings went to art school and, in the late 1940s, also found work at Denham Studios, lettering credit titles.

During his time working on these series, Meddings and his team developed a number of innovations in the filming of miniature models and landscapes which have since become standard in the industry.

[4] Once Broccoli realised the economic advantages of building detailed models instead of expensive full-sized constructions, Meddings was encouraged to come up with design concepts for the next film in the series, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

[4] He also designed and built the Lotus Esprit car which converted into a submersible, cleverly intercutting full-sized body shells with one-quarter-scale miniatures.

The climatic destruction of a gigantic satellite dish used a model built by Meddings' team, intercut with scenes shot with stuntmen in Britain.

[7] In 1975, Meddings created cost-effective model monsters which could be photographed in the same frame as the actors[4] in the prehistoric adventure film The Land That Time Forgot.

Due to the film's schedule overruns and Meddings' own commitments to the James Bond series, he was unable to complete the dam flooding sequence and the production hired a California-based company to complete the sequence – resulting in some visibly inferior miniature work in the latter part of the film.

Meddings believed that he was asked to supervise the effects for Batman (1989) because director Tim Burton was a fan of his work on Thunderbirds.