This volume contains survey articles based on the invited lectures given at the Twenty-second British Combinatorial Conference, held in July 2009 at the University of St Andrews. This biennial conference is a well-established international event, with speakers from all over the world. By its nature this volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research activity in several areas of combinatorics, including graph theory, design theory and packing problems. Each article is clearly written and assumes little prior knowledge on the part of the reader. The authors are some of the world's foremost researchers in their fields, and here they summarize existing results, and give a unique preview of the most recent developments. The book provides a valuable survey of the present state of knowledge in combinatorics. It will be useful to research workers and advanced graduate students, primarily in mathematics but also in computer science, statistics and engineering.