A newly refurbished First World War memorial is set to be unveiled in Leavesden next weekend.

Leavesden Community Group, a voluntary organisation for residents, has been raising funds to replace the old Sandstone memorial, which is based along the High Road and replace it with a new granite memorial.

After 15 months of fundraising, the memorial will be unveiled by the voluntary organisation on Sunday July 13. The work is estimated to have cost in the region of £10,000.

The memorial will commemorate the centenary of the First World War and will feature the names of the 27 people from the parish who were killed during the First World War. All the names will be engraved into the stone.

The memorial will also commemorate the servicemen and women who were killed during World War Two and other "subsequent conflicts."

Melvyn Beaumont, chairman of Leavesden Community Group believes that the community should come together in the same way that it did when the memorial was erected in the 1920s.

He said: "If those people then could muster enough money then, I think we should be able to give the same."

"We felt as a community group that it should come from the community. In the main, the majority of the money we are speaking about has come from the three main contributors."

"We are hoping that we will have in excess of 100 people at the unveiling of the memorial."

The owners of Kings Langley Building Supplies, Mr and Mrs Rance, donated the stone which will be used in the refurbishment and will be installed by RGR memorials, who are based in Northampton.

Co-operative funeral care paid for the Northampton based stonemasons to install the High Road memorial.

The foundations for the memorial were laid by Murrill.

It is thought the memorial stone, which remembers armed forces in the years between 1914 and 1919, used to be situated under the doorway to the public reading rooms in High Road.

At the ceremony, which will start at 3.30pm, there will be readings from Father Edward Green, vicar at Leavesden All Saints, Horseshoe Lane and residents will hear readings from postcards from a soldier who was fighting during the First World War.

The three postcards will be read out by Staff Sergeant Alex Gooch. The first one is dated from 1915, the second from 1917 and the final postcard 1918.

Mr Beaumont added: "We will be able to tell how the soldier is just about at the end of his time.

"The first one is very buoyant, but the last one at the end, is ‘I have had enough. I want to go home."