About Smart Recovery Southport
There is a lot of background to this idea and I could go on about it for ages… but so not to completely bore you I shall keep it short and simple.

My name is Lesley Rimmer and I’ve started Smart Recovery Southport to try and form a Recovery Hub within Southport in the UK.

I have been in the Mental Health and Alcohol Services for some time now and it has taken a long time for me to finally except that I have a drink problem – this is highlighted mainly because of my Mental Health so with finally realising that these two don’t quite get on, I have eventually concluded that I did need to sort one out. This decision was quite simple in the end… it comes down to choices… everybody has them about everything. I had to choose which issue to grab by the horns and sort out.

Easy it could only be the alcohol as I had originally chosen to go down the route where I did not choose to end up under the Mental Health Services.

Anyway, that decision was made and at this moment in time I can tell you that it was made on 15th January 2016 and today it’s 18th December 2017 so I am proud to say that “I am heading for 30 months’ sober. Finally, I decided about something and kept to it and yes I do believe I’m proud of that achievement and hope it continues successfully for the foreseeable future.

So, after the so-called swings and roundabouts I have decided to do something useful with my time. In 2015 I completed the Smart Recovery Training and then started facilitating Smart meetings in Southport.

This gave me a new focus and one meeting became 2 then became 3 and this led to what I called Smart Southport.

In July 2016, I had an opportunity to deliver a couple of Smart meetings in Waterloo and Bootle, which I agreed to do.

Now this head of mine started going into overdrive and I thought OK we’ll expand Smartlife to the rest of Sefton and there we have Smart Southport expanding into Smartlife Sefton.

It’s only a name, not some major company or charity, but it could have the potential to expand more and become a Recovery Hub/Venue. We don’t have anything like that in Southport or surrounding areas. Liverpool have The Brink which is amazing.

Despite being a growing trend, recovery cafes are still in short supply in the UK. Besides the Brink, the other recovery cafes that are available in the UK are - London (Paper and Cup), Henley (Towards Recovery Cafe in Henley), Blackburn (Cafe Hub), Glasgow (Nerd Cafe) and Edinburgh (Serenity Cafe).

In March 2015 Russell Brand open his Recovery Café Trew Era Café, in Hackney.