‘Fuzzy Ducks’, the club night held at the O2 Academy and once voted by FHM magazine as the easiest place to pull in the country, will run no longer.
It has come under constant pressure from local residents and has reportedly experienced a recent fall in attendees.
‘Fuzzy Ducks’ was held at the O2 Academy in East Oxford on Wednesday nights for more than a decade. The venue has a capacity of 1,350 and the night attracted a variety of guests, from Out of the Blue to David Hasselhoff.
Behaviour at the O2 Academy and the surrounding residential area led to numerous complaints of anti-social behaviour from local residents. The mid-week night, called “notorious” by the Oxford Times, promised cheap alcohol until the early hours of the morning.
Police patrols were extended to the area in 2010 to cope with students exiting the club, and a recent application to extend opening hours at the venue received more than 60 complaints.
Ed Chipperfield, a member of the East Oxford Residents’ Associations Forum, is glad to see the end of the night. He commented that “Fuzzy Ducks was marketed as an ugly night of excess, and that’s precisely how the customers treated the area before and after they went. You can’t blame the customers for behaving exactly as the promoters wanted them to, really.”
‘Fuzzy Ducks’ is to be replaced by a new night run by the O2 Academy and the Oxford Brookes Student Union. The concern for residents remains a return to previous behaviour under a different name.
Mr Chipperfield is cautiously optimistic about the new night, saying, “I think everyone here – students as well as ‘locals’ – is cautiously optimistic about a higher expectation from a new event promoted by Brookes.”
‘But if it falls below expectations, then people living in the area will have no problems bringing their troubles up with the relevant people – the local police.”
However, residents’ complaints have been a pressure for the decade Fuzzy Ducks ran, but the night has only just ended. Reports are that the popularity of the Brookes night decreased significantly in the final term of this last year. According to one Brookes student, the 1,350 capacity venue failed to get above 300 clubbers on most Wednesdays.
Club management would neither confirm nor deny if the decision to end the night was a response to pressure from residents or the waning popularity of the night among students.
Oxford Brookes Law student Joseph Ware reacted positively to the closure. He said, “I just see it as an excuse for people to get blind drunk with the promise of sex.”
“But in reality it’s a sweaty pit of hormonal sports teams embracing a social fad. And besides the special guests, it has nothing to put it above another night elsewhere.”
