Tissue engineering is an exciting new cross-disciplinary methodology which applies the principles of engineering and structure-function relationships between normal and pathological tissues to develop biological substitute to restore, maintain or improve tissue function. Tissue engineering therefore involves a melange of approaches encompassing developmental biology, tissue mechanics, medicine, cell differentiation and survival biology, mechanostransduction and nano-fabrication technology. The central tissue of interest in this review is cartilage. Traumatic injuries, congenital abnormalities and age-related degenerative diseases can all lead to cartilage loss; however, the low cell density and very limited self-renewal capacity of cartilage necessitate the development of effective therapeutic repair strategies for this tissue. The ontogeny of the chondrocyte, which is the cell that provides the biosynthetic machinery for all the component parts of cartilage, is discussed, since an understanding of cartilage development is central to the maintenance of a chondrocytic phenotype in any strategy aiming to produce a replacement cartilage. A plethora of matrices have been developed for cartilage engineering approaches and many of these are discussed and their in vitro and in vivo applications covered in this review. Tissue engineering is entering an exciting era; significant advances have been made; however, many technical challenges remain to be solved before this technology becomes widely applicable across all areas of cartilage repair biology. © 2008 Society of Chemical Industry.