In our paper we try to describe the basic concepts of chemical waves and spatial pattern formation in a simple way. We pay particular attention to self-organisation phenomena in extended excitable systems. These result in the appearance of travelling waves, spiral waves, target patterns, Turing structures or more complicated structures called scroll waves, which are three-dimensional systems. We describe the most famous oscillating reaction, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, in greater detail. This is because it is of great interest in both physical chemistry and in studies on the evolution and sustenance of self-organising biological systems.