LSE reveals its extraordinary stash of presents However, because the LSE is not open to the public, the gifts are not widely viewed. But the exchange, which is one of the world's oldest, has now opened its doors to reveal many items and there are plans - led by City veteran Brian Winterflood - to open a museum. Given that the LSE traces its origins to the 17th century, its Paternoster Square offices in the City are now home to gifts and other artefacts of great historical and monetary value. The single most expensive gift is worth close to £650,000. Some of the more recent gifts received by the bourse were given to celebrate stock market floats. Damac, the Dubai property group that raised $348m (£213m) from a London listing earlier this month, gave a framed model of a dhow sailing vessel. Bottling group Coca-Cola HBC, which moved its primary listing from Athens to London in April, presented the exchange with a crystal Coke bottle, while Air China celebrated its 2004 float with a model of a jumbo jet. Perhaps most impressive of the more recent presents was from Ivan Glasenberg, the chief executive of Glencore, when the commodities giant completed its initial public offering (IPO) in 2011. To mark the float, the company, which was valued at £36.7bn at the IPO, gifted the bourse a model of a mining truck, carved from a single lump of coal dug from the company's Prodeco mine in Colombia. Mr Glasenberg and other Glencore executives certainly had a reason to celebrate - the listing turned five of its directors, including its chief executive, into billionaires. But it is not just IPOs that have been commemorated with a present. Some items were given to mark the LSE's contribution to events that changed the world. While the bourse closed in the five months that followed the outbreak of the First World War, it reopened in January 1915 and then continued to operate, under restrictions, throughout the rest of the conflict. Once the restrictions were fully removed in 1922, Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England for 24 years until 1944, gave the exchange a silver gilt Italian rose water dish, dated 1620, to recognise its "close and friendly co-operation" during and after the war. Members of the exchange also thanked the committee, set up by the LSE to deal with the Great Crash of 1929, for its efforts with another rose water dish a few years later. Other items are much quirkier. The most striking is a Victorian model of a grasshopper, which was presented by Sir Wilfrid Atlay, chairman of the exchange between 1918 and 1923. More recently, other exchanges have presented gifts to the LSE on visits to London that reflect their national characters. When the LSE hosted the 1986 annual meeting of the Federation Internationale des Bourses de Valeurs - the industry trade body now called the World Federation of Exchanges - the Australian bourse marked the occasion appropriately enough by giving the exchange a map charting James Cook's voyages. The Paris bourse also presented a fetching set of claret jugs. Xavier Rolet, chief executive of the LSE, said the gift-giving tradition to the exchange "underlines London's standing as the world's most international financial centre." Ever since the 1600s, when trading took place in Jonathan's Coffee House, where explorers raised money to travel the Yukon and the Far East, the tradition of gift giving continues into the 21st century, as companies and entrepreneurs from around the world use our markets to finance their own growth adventures.