Final Resting Place for Young British Artists

The End of a Sensational Era

Sensation! The name said it all. The exhibition that turned oddball modern art into a mainstay of water-cooler conversation, and turned a generation of artists into front-page news: Damien's shark, Tracey's bed Jake and Dinos' scenes of torture and mutilation, and that hilarious thing with the kebab.

And suddenly all of us trendy young journalists, publishers and socialites were picking our way through the puddles of Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney ('So daring! You know it's not even on the tube, darling') to turn our bemused, amused gazes on an art-world that only months before we hardly knew existed.

And now, the final curtain is being drawn on the work of the single most important figure from that generation. The Saatchi Gallery is to close, and the great collector is to move his work to Chelsea, after a very nasty dispute with the owners of County Hall.

Chelsea is not a place where exciting art is made or seen. Instead of East London’s young, multi-ethnic, 24-hour party people, the visitors will be Ladies Who Lunch, dropping by to pick out tasteful things to impress their friends at dinner parties. The galleries of Sloane Square and the King's Road are staffed by the languid daughters of the Home Counties' aristocracy, killing time before marriage, rather than the tattooed, angry young artists who took charge of Saatchi’s original gallery in Boundary Road.

And Saatchi himself seems to have changed. Marriage to Nigella Lawson has mellowed him. He hopes to have a trendy restaurant in his new gallery, which would certainly go bankrupt if his exhibition included the stomach-churningly repulsive art of the Chapman brothers (whose new work has the lovely title 'Like a Dog Returning to its Vomit'). And while I could quite happily go through the rest of my life without ever encountering another of their monstrously perverted creations, the shock value was a huge part of what made Saatchi's shows so thrilling, and without it, the London art-world will be much diminished.

There is one ray of hope: the court case that surrounded his move out of County Hall included allegations that he had attempted to throttle one of his landlord's representatives in a dispute over a disabled toilet. The passion isn't all gone from the man who used to have one of Damien Hirst's dead sheep in his hallway, and perhaps the new gallery will be a wake-up call to this sleepy part of town.

Saddles Soar in the City

Cycling in the capital has reached record highs, according to the latest figures revealed by mayor Ken Livingstone. Nearly 120,000 journeys are made each week on the capital's key roads, compared to 59,000 in 2000 making London the fastest growing cycling city in Europe, according to TfL's director of surface transport.

New Rubens Discovered

A previously unseen and only recently discovered drawing by Rubens forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition of the Flemish master’s work at the National Gallery. 'Rubens: A Master in the Making' outlines the first 15 years of the artist's career and also includes Massacre of the Innocents - one of his most famous works.

Somerset House Seeks Out Snaps

Somerset House - currently home to the Courtauld Gallery and a London outpost of St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum - has announced its ambition to become the home of a national museum of photography. Collections held at the Victoria and Albert and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, currently have relatively little space to display their works.

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