17.06.22
Cardiff is to celebrate the life and work of murdered MP Jo Cox by staging a Great Get Together in one of the city’s most culturally diverse suburbs.

The event, which will be launched on Wednesday, June 22, on the steps of the Senedd, is an opportunity for communities across Cardiff to unite and share experiences over a weekend of artistic, religious and sporting events.

It will also honour the memory of the Labour MP and civil rights campaigner, pictured above. A passionate humanitarian, she was murdered by a far-right supremacist in 2016 as she was about to hold a constituency surgery in Yorkshire. In her first speech in Parliament, she said: “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”

The Jo Cox Foundation stages Great Get Togethers every year around the UK on the anniversary of her birth.

The core of Cardiff’s Great Get Together will take place on Saturday, June 25, at the Grangetown Festival in Grange Pavilion. The Great Walk Together is a guided tour of the area, focusing on the wide diversity of religions and places of worship and begins at the Betty Campbell statue in the city centre at 1pm and ends at the Pavilion.

Also planned for the Saturday is a cricket match, football activities, and music from Cardiff’s Choir With No Name at 1pm. On Sunday, there will also be a community barbecue at St Mary’s Church in Grangetown.

Cllr Julie Sangani, Cardiff Council’s Cabinet member for Public Health and Equalities, said the Great Get Together offered a perfect opportunity for the city’s many ethnic groups to show unity – and have a great time. “Jo Cox’s message was ‘More in Common’ and was the guiding principle of her life in politics,” she said.

The Great Get Together comes at the end of Refugee Week which this year takes as its theme ‘community, mutual care, and the human ability to start again’. As part of the celebrations, St Mary’s Primary School in Grangetown will be honoured as a ‘School of Sanctuary’ for its work in making refugee children welcome.