Steve Madden made the photographs in The Grind on London buses, in the evening, during the worst weather of three winters. He would finish his morning radio shift for the BBC and travel into Central London whenever rain or freezing cold promised condensation on the bus windows. What he wanted was the misted glass itself: the condensation familiar to many Londoners, through which an endless stream of unidentifiable people becomes partly obscured. The result is not conventional transit documentary so much as an attention to colour and form, as the harsh lighting of public transport turns coats, scarves, and faces into flat fields and soft gradients.
Madden’s subjects remain unidentified, and that anonymity shapes the work. His portraits are cropped to remove any edges of windows or door frames, freeing them from bus infrastructure into rectangles of form and colour. Across the sequence, the part-obscured figures appear in moments of introspection, reverie and repose, sadness and joy, with occasional fleeting glimpses of human interaction. Madden has said the best pictures were the ones that got away, and the city is the reason: obstructions, crowds, timetables, withdrawn routes, and demolished stops.
Bus travel is now an unpromising subject partly because of what has changed around it. When Madden was working, five million bus journeys were made in the capital every day. Air conditioning has since softened the condensation he relied on; passenger numbers fell after the pandemic; the Strand stop he returned to is gone and the road is now pedestrianised. Conditions that once seemed ordinary are already receding. Published in February 2025, the book gathers 78 images over 128 pages.
The commitment behind the work is long-standing rather than opportunistic. Madden grew up in London a bus spotter, and he remains the main owner of one of the buses, including a decommissioned Routemaster purchased nearly twenty years ago with three Radio 2 friends. In 2005 he photographed a woman on the 38 bus in Shaftesbury Avenue, framed by the bus window; this image inspired The Grind. The project is a sustained example of a private fascination pursued over time, becoming a record of a city’s daily passage and of the conditions under which that passage is disappearing.
