Friends and colleagues came together on 9 March 1937 to send off Walter Gropius and his wife Ise Gropius, who had decided to leave Britain for the United States. The couple had arrived in London in Otober 1934, at the invitation of Jack Pritchard, owner of the Isokon furniture company and Lawn Road Flats (also known as the Isokon Building), where the Gropiuses lived during their stay in London (Burke 2015, 50f.; Daybelge 2019, 165–171). It was expected that Gropius, together with the architect Maxwell Fry, would design a second Isokon building for Manchester (Daybelge/Englund 2019, 83f.). In addition, the art historian Herbert Read planned to publish a book on Gropius with Faber & Faber. Gropius tried to establish himself as a freelance architect, but was only able to realise a few projects, among them Wood House in Shipbourne, Kent, and a villa in Chelsea.  Other projects – such as the Manchester Isokon building – failed, as did his plans to establish an English Bauhaus (Daybelge/Englund 2019, 119). In 1937, he accepted a professorship at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge/Mass.

The farewell dinner, organised by Jack Pritchard and chaired by the biologist Julian Huxley, brought together many of the people Gropius had connected with during his stay in London and was held at the Trocadero Restaurant in Coventry Street on 9 March (Anker 2005, 9). It is likely that the Isobar, the restaurant at Lawn Road Flats, where Walter and Ise Gropius lived, had insufficient space to host the event. The Trocadero, meanwhile, was a more representative and well-known venue in London, with a history going back to the nineteenth century and having undergone redecoration in 1930 (http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/TrocaderoLeicesterSquareLondon.htm. Accessed 8 January 2021). The “Bill of Fare” menu was designed by László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus artist who had also fled to London and was responsible for the Isokon brochures. The menu was printed by the Lund Humphries publishing house.

The guest list of 135 shows that both local and émigré architects, artists and intellectuals were invited. Among the former were the architects Wells Coats, Maxwell Fry and art historian Herbert Read; the latter included artists and architects such as László Moholy-Nagy and Ernst L. Freud, as well as architecture historians Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner.
The guest list reflects the multi-national nature of the artistic community in London at the time and features the names of many who subsequently departed the city. Of course, Gropius was under the first, moving to the United States, where he continued his architectural practice, taught at Harvard and became the ‘American Gropius.’ László Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago and became director of the New Bauhaus. Nikolaus Pevsner, however, remained, and spent several years working on his monumental study, The Buildings of England. The architect Ernst L. Freud, son of Sigmund Freud, also continued to live in London, where he designed residential buildings and was involved in planning housing for migrants.