The material investigated was 304 (18/8) stainless steel that had been rolled with 70% at 700°C reduction to a final thickness of 2.9 mm. This warm rolling was chosen to avoid complications due to the formation of deformation martensite at room temperature. A 2.9x30x170 mm strip of the steel was then annealed in a controlled temperature gradient ranging from room temperature up to 1100°C so that all possible microstructural stages were represented, comprising recovery, recrystallisation and grain growth as well as their related texture changes. All measurements were made after cooling the specimen down to room temperature.Grain sizes were measured by LUS using the b-parameter analysis of attenuation data. In addition, the newly developed method for scanning the generating laser was applied to show the influence of texture on the anisotropy of wave velocities. Thus, both grain size and texture were continuously monitored along the length of the gradient annealed specimen.X-ray diffraction (XRD) was applied at various positions such that recovery and recrystallisation could be quantified using peak breadth measurements. In addition, microstructures and textures were determined using electron back-scattering diffraction (EBSD) at several locations corresponding to different annealing temperatures.All the observations were congruent in defining the location where primary recrystallisation had taken place over a relatively short distance on the specimen. The XRD line breadths dropped sharply and then remained constant after higher temperatures. However, the LUS grain sizes which also showed a sharp decrease then increased continuously as grain growth progressed, in good agreement with the EBSD observations. The anisotropic wave velocity results confirmed a significant change in the texture corresponding to recrystallisation despite the fact that EBSD showed that there was, in fact, only a modest weakening. A sensitive parameter defining recrystallisation was found to be the Poisson’s ratio which fell sharply and then increased very gradually up to the highest temperatures. This is interpreted as being due to the textural change during recrystallisation, followed by some sharpening of the annealing texture during subsequent grain growth.