The first meetings were held in the office of Sir Tom Kibble and were extremely informal, as Tom himself recollected:
"UK Cosmo has grown from a very small seed. The first meetings, nearly thirty years ago, were held in my office at Imperial -- fortunately, I was Head of Department at the time, so had a fairly large office, but there were probably no more than a dozen people there. All talks were on the blackboard, and so was the programme. We started out by people suggesting topics that were written in a list on the board and then deciding what we'd talk about. A bit later we had to move to a seminar room, but still with a similar format. Growth to the present scale has been gradual but inexorable."
To this day we try to maintain the spirit of those first meetings as much as possible, with some of our most successful following the relaxed format of yesteryear. UK Cosmology meetings traditionally offer opportunities for younger researchers to talk about their work and to interact with more senior colleagues. In all likelihood, some of the speakers at our most recent event would not have been born when it all began in Tom's office.
