A CCD camera survey has been conducted of the X-ray emitting regions of a sample of clusters of galaxies. This sample includes at least one cluster from each of the classes in the new Forman-Jones classification scheme (Forman & Jones 1982ARA&A..20..547F). In this paper, the techniques used to obtain, reduce and analyse the data are presented, along with results for the cluster Abell 85. For the central X-ray emitting region of this cluster, a core radius of between 1.2 and 1.6Mpc is estimated from the galaxy radial number density distribution. The properties of the galaxies in the core of this cluster are significantly different from those of the galaxies in the outer regions of the area covered in the survey, in terms of luminosity function and colour distribution.