Towers of London.

1995 was unquestionably the year of the Young British Artist. Given a big push with "General Release" in Venice during the last Biennale and with the much decried "Brilliant!" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, YBAs rounded out the year by capturing the nation's premier art award, the Turner Prize, for one of their own: Damien Hirst. After the media feeding frenzy that surrounded Hirst's triumph, it was almost inevitable that things would cool down temporarily on the YBA front. Charles Saatchi, who has held five YBA shows in his London art emporium since 1992, turned his attention to youth across the Atlantic for the first time since he began showcasing young Brits: American artists Sean Landers, Charles Long, Tony Oursler, and Charles Ray, among others. This summer he departs from his traditional group-show format to turn over his whole gallery to a single artist: the German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol, whose carved and painted wooden figures and animals are masterpieces of quirky understatement. As for Hirst, he has by no means been invisible; he weighed in at the Hayward's art and film fest, "Spellbound," but his first big screen effort, Hanging Around, 1996, was surprisingly listless.

Last year's sensation may have been partially eclipsed, but the slack has been more than taken up by the antics of London's cultural commissars. Here there were triumphs and tragedies, promising beginnings and ignominious ends. Eagerly awaited was the opportunity to hear Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, lecture on a subject close to his heart: the dilemma facing the contemporary art museum. Such was the level of anticipation that national newspapers deluged the lecture's sponsors, Thames and Hudson, with requests to prepublish extracts. In the end, they must have been glad such requests were denied. Everyone expected to hear something about Bankside, the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art, for which detailed architectural plans had just been released; instead, Serota gave a thoughtful but less than earth-shattering history of museum installation, and talked about creating loose "climatic zones" of like-minded art.

If Serota's lecture was a disappointment, the plans for Bankside are encouraging. Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have designed a neat, glass-fronted box to be inserted inside one half of the massive brick bunker, which will transform the existing structure into a minimalist, 100-foot-wide, 500-foot-long Crystal Palace with three floors of extremely flexible gallery space. The biggest drawback to Bankside is the shortage of natural light, though this defect is somewhat counterbalanced by the floor that will rise above the roof line. Even so, the Swiss duo overestimate the amount of available sunlight. Light in architectural drawings is almost invariably crystal clear. London skies tend to be, well, blurred....

One of the main reasons for building Bankside is to increase display space and thereby encourage loans and donations; though the Tate's collection boasts work by most major artists of the 20th century, the only non-British artists represented in any depth are Giacometti and Mark Rothko. This strategy is already paying off. German collector Josef Froehlich, who has rich holdings of post-'60s German and American art, will loan a number of works to the Tate, which will be incorporated in annual rehangings of the Tate's own collection - the most important contribution made by a German collector to a British museum since 1863 when Queen Victoria's German husband, Prince Albert, donated 22 old-master works to the National Gallery.

As the Tate moves ahead, the Hayward Gallery stalls. Its director, Henry Meyric Hughes, resigned suddenly after three years at the helm. The Hayward, housed in an impractical Brutalist structure, has never had a clear profile, or built up a loyal audience. No surprise, given that its program, prior to Hughes' arrival, lurched from Leonardo and Mexican sculpture to Warhol and photojournalism. Hughes' mandate was to give the Hayward a tighter, more contemporary focus.

Though his efforts met with a measure of success (recent highs were the Yves Klein retrospective and a contemporary photography show that included Andreas Gursky and Gabriel Orozco), several shows failed to gel: a survey of recent painting, "Unbound," was poorly curated and sloppily installed, while the Julian Opic "retrospective" seemed premature. Rumor has it that Hughes' superiors were pushing for a more populist and commercial approach. Hughes' resignation will have far-reaching repercussions. Because the Hayward is due to close at the end of this century for major rebuilding work, if it doesn't decide what its role is fast, it could be overshadowed and ultimately frozen out by the new Tate. Bankside is only a short walk up the river, and it will open in just four years, provided fundraising goals are met.

Already, the buzz surrounding YBAs and Bankside stimulated a spate of new gallery openings this spring. Robert Prime and Lotta Hammer opened up shop not far from Karsten Schubert and Laure Genillard in the discreetly bohemian quarter known as Fitzrovia. The Swiss dealer Marc Jancou closed his gallery above Karsten Schubert and relocated to Soho, right above Ronnie Scott's jazz club, reopening under the name London Projects. But Jancou doesn't plan on taking root here either: he intends to keep mounting shows in nongallery spaces. Robert Prime (an invented, British-sounding name) is run by two Italians - Tommaso Corvi-Mora and Gregorio Magnani. They represent YBAs Angela Bulloch and Liam Gillick, and will also show European and American work, kicking off with the grungy photoworks that French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster took in India. In a show that could easily have been entitled "Remembrance of Things Past Their Self-By Date," shots of Le Corbusier's gently decaying Chandigarh complex juxtaposed details of Indian miniatures and a local photographer's studio. Swedish-born Hammer opened with zany computer manipulations of tourist images by YBA Graham Gussin and plans to show more of this lost generation - both in the gallery and in a project room next door.

The most ambitious exhibition mounted by a new gallery was "Inner London" at Delfina in the south east section of the city. Delfina occupies the ground floor of an artists' studio complex, and the show, curated by David Gilmour, featured five YBAs. Alex Hartley encased photographs of dour tower blocks inside steel cabinets fronted by frosted glass (yes, that's what London skies are like); Catherine Yass offered lurid, backlit transparencies of London's main meat market, and Steve Johnson enlarged silver versions of London's monuments typically found on charm bracelets, then cast them in bronze. Resembling Dali-esque soft objects, they are lumpy souvenirs of a city in meltdown.

But it was David Griffiths who stole the show. For over two years he has been a self-styled "artist in residence at the Houses of Parliament," photographing nocturnal TV interviews of politicians that take place on a lawn situated between Parliament and Westminster Abbey. As in Goya's Third of May, 1808, 1814-15, in which a shadowy firing squad aims at a man dressed in white, Griffiths' protagonists are spotlit shards suspended in seas of blackness. Looking at these images, you wonder whether you're watching sinners or saints.

The most outlandish of all the self-styled impresarios was, without a doubt, 25-year-old Joshua Compston. The onetime owner of a ramshackle gallery in East London called Factual Nonsense, he seemed more interested in bombing museums than in building them. The son of a judge, Compston sent out press releases that smacked of Marinetti on Ecstasy. He once exhibited prints by YBAs in a roofless building, organized several open-air events with artist-run stalls and artworks hung from railings and trees, and sponsored performances by, among others, Leigh Bowery, Tracey Emin, and the Beijing Opera. One of his recent projects was to cure people addicted to TV soaps by introducing them to "culture."

On March 6, after attending the glitzy opening of the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, Compston died - allegedly from a combination of drink and drugs (at the time of writing the coroner had yet to release his report). His funeral lived up to what had come before. Hundreds of artists and friends, flanked by mounted police, accompanied the coffin on the half-mile journey from his East London home while a jazz band played "When the Saints Go Marching In." Artists Gavin Turk and Gary Hume decorated the coffin - rust-colored flowers on a turquoise ground, based on a William Morris design; Gilbert & George photographed the procession.

Compston's send-off bore an uncanny resemblance to a 17-foot canvas that was then the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Royal Academy dedicated to the work of Lord Leighton - the preeminent Victorian painter who felt modern art was not properly appreciated by his contemporaries. Leighton's canvas depicts a more appropriately deferential society: a Cimabue Madonna being carried through the streets of 13th-century Florence, flanked by a procession of artists, musicians, writers, priests, and politicians. Suddenly a similar, yet much more moving scene was being enacted on the streets of East London: instead of Cimabue's gold-ground altarpiece, there was Compston's turquoise-ground coffin.

If, in the spirit of Compston, the first crop of YBAs made their name in the late '80s with a series of exhibitions organized in derelict buildings in East London, most of them have now moved on to white cubes, with the exception of Anya Gallaccio, who continues to show in off-beat venues. Gallaccio, who participated in Hirst's first, and most famous, curatorial venture "Freeze," 1988, presented a sort of "Freeze Part II" in her latest installation, Intensities and Surfaces, 1996, which comprised a 34-ton block of ice situated in a disused Victorian pumping station. A half-ton block of salt was placed in the central core to speed up the melting process. Though there have been plenty of attempts to "naturalize" Minimalist forms, Gallaccio's latest seemed peculiarly English. This primeval monolith, full of strange cavities and light effects, reminded me of the eroded beach detritus, driftwood, and pebbles that so appealed to Henry Moore and Paul Nash in the '30s. Theirs, too, was an esthetic born of living in a damp country - albeit on a less industrial scale.

Helen Chadwick was fascinated by even more outlandish organic processes. Mutability and decay were her overarching themes, yet her art was ebullient rather than morbid. Her most remarkable recent work, Piss Flowers, 1991-92, was featured in the Pompidou's "Feminin-Masculin: Le Sexe de L'Art." The "flowers" are white bronze casts of the cavities that Chadwick and her partner formed in snow by urinating. She described it as a unique form of lovemaking, a "metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily," yet these white efflorescences are as fluffy and dazzling as any cloud study by Constable. At 42, Chadwick, who died quite unexpectedly on March 15, had already created a mental and physical landscape all her own.

James Hall contributes regularly to Artforum.