If a thick, turbulent boundary layer is disturbed near the rigid boundary, the flow changes are confined initially to a thin layer adjacent to the boundary. Elliott (1958) and Panofsky & Townsend (1964) have attempted to calculate the flow disturbance caused by an abrupt change in surface roughness by assuming special velocity distributions which are consistent with a logarithmic velocity variation near the boundary. Inspection of their distributions shows that the deviations from the upstream distribution are self-preserving in form, and it is shown that self-preserving development is dynamically possible if log l0/z0 (l0 being depth of modified flow, z0 roughness length) is fairly large and if l0 is small compared with the total thickness of the layer. Other kinds of surface disturbance may lead to self-preserving changes of the original flow and the theory is developed also for flow downstream of a line roughness, for the temperature distribution downstream of a boundary separating an upstream region of uniform roughness and heat-flux from a region of different or possibly varying roughness and heat-flux, and for the return of a complete boundary layer to self-preserving development after a disturbance. The requirement that the distributions of velocity and temperature should conform to the logarithmic, equilibrium forms near the surface makes the predictions of surface stress and surface flux nearly independent of the exact nature of the turbulent transfer process, and the profiles of velocity and temperature are determined within narrow limits by the surface fluxes. To provide explicit profiles, the mixing-length transfer relation is used. Its validity for the self-preserving flows is discussed in an appendix.