In the summer of 1991 geometric group theorists gathered in Sussex for the Geometric Group Theory Symposium. For the first two weeks of July they met at the Workshop session in Sussex University, where they took part in informal research seminars. There were 35 talks, including a course on the theory of racks by Roger Fenn and a series of lectures on semi-hyperbolic groups by Martin Bridson. This culminated in a London Mathematical Society Spitalfields Lecture day, with talks by Alan Beardon, Walter Neumann and Hyman Bass.

During the third week the residential conference took place at the White House Conference Centre in Chelwood Gate. There was a total of 40 talks, including four lectures by Eliahu Rips on his classification of groups acting freely on ℝ-trees and two lectures by Andrew Casson on convergence groups and his proof of the Seifert conjecture.

We had asked the participants of the conference to survey their special field of interest. About half of the papers in the first volume of these proceedings are of this nature, and we hope this will provide a good overview of the state of the art of geometric group theory at the time of the conference. In particular, Michael Gromov's response to our request was so enthusiastic, that we decided to dedicate the entire second volume to his essay Asymptotic Invariants of Infinite Groups. The remainder of the articles are either extended versions of papers given at the conference or answers to questions posed there.

The first volume is concluded by a list of problems suggested at the Geometric Group Theory Symposium.