Mobility and automobility in Bill Griffiths

After an early life characterised by mobility, Bill Griffiths settled in Seaham in County Durham. Griffiths was a motorcyclist and one time member of a motorcycle gang, lived in temporary squat accommodation in London, was a guest worker in Germany and lived on a houseboat in the UK, and constructed patterns of living that challenged notions of ‘home’. He also had a lifelong interest in the immobility of prison life and the notion of justice. He not only experienced prison himself, but also often championed the causes of prisoner rights. This essay examines the way that the political and material implications of ideas of movement, practices of automobility, and enforced immobility through imprisonment are evident in his poetic work, and claims that movement is a process that reveals things about the mobile subject, and those spaces the subject moves through.