This paper has been written to assist Actuaries making an acquaintance with the London reinsurance market and needing assistance with the practical difficulties involved when applying known reserving methods to that market. Examples are given throughout to illustrate every point made and to give emphasis to difficulties that arise in practice. To make the exercise fully realistic, all examples (except a few that are purely illustrative) are ones that have actually arisen in practice. The names of the relevant offices arc not given and all cohorts of values have been multiplied by arbitrary constants which further conceal the identity without derogating from the value of the information that they contain. Graphs are used extensively.