One of us was recently congratulated by their local primary care trust commissioner on having set up the first memory clinic in the UK. This was incorrect but that was the possible impression given in the first sentence of Dr Foy's interesting survey (Psychiatr Bull 2008; 32: 467–9). The paper that she cites ^{Reference Philpot and Levy1} described the Maudsley Memory Clinic that we think was the second in the UK but the first based within a psychiatric service. We ought to have cited the excellent paper by van der Cammen et al ^{Reference Van der Cammen, Simpson, Fraser, Preker and Exton-Smith2} that actually describes the first clinic at St Pancras Hospital but which had not been published at the time. Now that there is to be ‘a memory clinic in every town’ we thought we had better set the record straight.