AbstractCarboniferous geology has developed very rapidly over the past two decades since ideas on sedimentology and new radiometric scales, together with new biostratigraphical schemes based on miospores, conodonts and foraminifera have been synthesized with ideas on plate tectonic processes, climatic changes and oscillations of sea level. The application of the McKenzie model of basin development to the Carboniferous, and the relating of eustatic sea-level changes, which had a profound effect on Carboniferous palaeo-geography, to fluctuations in the size of the Gondwanan ice sheets, have been major factors in the understanding of Carboniferous processes. The Carboniferous evolution of Britain took place to the (present) north of a plate suturing occurring along a line extending from Galicia, through Armorica and the Massif Central to the Vosges, during mid Devonian to early Carboniferous times. In front of this collision zone was the Rheno-Hercynian zone which opened probably during mid Devonian times and which was partly floored by oceanic crust; its closure can be traced through to late Carboniferous times as a series of northwardly directed thrust complexes. To the (present) north of this zone was a foreland on which basins developed on either side of a persistent Wales-London-Brabant High. Studies by Dewey (1982) and Leeder (1982, 1987, 1988) have shown that late Devonian to early Carboniferous extension, involving β factors of up to 2, produced a series of grabens and half-grabens in the Caledonian basement. These developing structures were the dominant control on early Carboniferous sedimentation and produced a sea-bed topography which was