ABSTRACT The occasion of The Company of Biologists' workshop ‘Cellular gateways: expanding the role of endocytosis in plant development’ on 22–25 April 2018, at Wiston House, an Elizabethan mansion in West Sussex, England, witnessed stimulating and lively discussions on the mechanism and functions of endocytosis in plant cells. The workshop was organized by Jenny Russinova, Daniël Van Damme (both VIB/University of Ghent, Belgium) and Takashi Ueda (National Institute for Basic Biology, Okazaki, Japan), and aimed to bridge the gap in knowledge about the endocytic machinery and its cargos in the plant field.