Given his avant-garde credentials and enthusiasm for innovation, Alloway could have been the unassailable champion of British art in the 1960s. Yet, a month after New London Situation in August 1961, he had departed for the USA. Had he stayed another year, he would not only have witnessed, but also been fully involved in, the explosion of British Pop. Was his departure untimely? It certainly was for the British art scene which lost its most internationally aware and networked critic and entrepreneur. Had he been championing it, British Pop would undoubtedly have benefited, as would other new movements and tendencies. Alloway realized the art scene in Britain was changing almost out of all recognition between the early and mid-1960s. At the beginning of 1961, he was complaining that only four of the eighteen painters in Situation painters were signed up to a gallery. Of those four, two would have been unable to show their Situation paintings in their respective galleries because of their size. The unavailability of large, avant-garde paintings in the mainstream galleries was, of course, one of the reasons why Situation was mounted. Situation may have been poorly attended and lost money but, more important in influencing Alloway's decision to leave Britain was what he considered the lack of “professionalism” and its implications. The Paris art scene gained professionalism in the early twentieth century, and New York had achieved it in the 1940s but, he wrote in Art International in 1962, “In London it has been lacking, because of the segmented structure of English society and because of hostility and indifference between the generations. (In London there are no senior artists who command the respect of the younger artists.)” The British art scene remained a microcosm of British society. Alloway caricatured the St Ives “Middle Generation” artist as a kind of upper class gentleman who ventured into town only occasionally, thus avoiding mixing with the lower orders (the younger generation) with their common tastes and lack of etiquette.

The contrast between the cultures of the London and New York art scenes had made a huge impact on Alloway during his visit to the USA in 1958.