THE population in the UK breathed a sigh of relief when the Second World War ended and celebrated VE and VJ days and moved on. However, another sinister threat loomed on the horizon: that of Soviet Russia.

Uncle Joe Stalin’s forces had taken over eastern Europe, raped and plundered and transported back anything of value to the motherland and were flexing their muscles for more.

There was the A-Bomb and then the H-Bomb and something called the 50-Megaton Bomb, all of which suggested Hitler’s scorched earth policy would look distinctly small fry by comparison.

As the Cold War progressed, there was talk of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and we tried to imagine what would happen if Uncle Joe’s Army landed in England. We knew that the top communist officials would be given houses in Moor Park, for although we would be assured all were equal, some would be more equal than others.

Watford Town Hall would look somewhat different with large posters of Lenin and Stalin adorning the facia and probably the newly-built Watford Technical College would be taken over for re-evaluation and retraining of the reactionary thought processes.

The possibilities are endless but fortunately the Russians did not invade and we did not have to attend May Day Parades up and down Watford High Street. The Russians did not fill in most of The Pond and inflict their tedious, unimaginative Soviet architecture on the renamed Watford Red Square.

We did not have to suffer dull grey stonework paved all over the area. Instead we kept our town Pond with the yellow privet hedges and green cast-iron railings and all was well with the world. Those ghastly visions were the stuff of nightmares.

Or were they? While we were over in the UK at Christmas, I took a long-postponed look at the new Pond development.

Ellie, who hails from Buckinghamshire but knows Watford well, had been down the High Street for some last minute Christmas shopping and hinted I might be underwhelmed by the vista at the top of what used to be the old High Street. I told her how much it cost and she did not believe a word of it.

The next day I stood there taking in what had been the scene of my youth: where I had parked my car outside the old West Herts Post offices at 139, The Parade; where I had walked down the street and enjoyed the sight of so many young people in the Mocha Bar and The Chef. It was not the café quarter as such back then, but it had a great ambience, with young girls leaning or sitting on the railings round the Pond.

Of course The Pond is smaller now, but as I looked around, I wondered if the Russians had not arrived incognito in the shape of an army of jackbooted Soviet architects descending on the town to produce a piazza so lacking in flair or originality. Where is breadth, soul, tone, subtlety, vision, contrast or colour? Where is the personality? Not one of those qualities is present.

It is a tedious, boring uninspired piazza. It is so sad that the ratepayers of Watford had to see their money wasted on such a characterless monotony. To think £4.3m was spent on the area as a whole, replacing a previous soulless concept, which cost a few bob back in the mid-70s. The Parade, Watford, once looked individual but that and the town itself have been reduced to the “one town centre fits all” concept.

It is hardly something to be proud of; certainly not something worth my special trip to see just exactly what they had done.

I shall not return. I should have known better. They pulled down the shops (Ratners and co) and opened up the view of the parish church, and included what was billed as the Millennium Square or the civic barbecue-terrace as I dubbed it.

Yes, they have put a bridge in: what modern architects fittingly call a “fee-cha”. Now the Pond, in its original size, could have done with a bridge to act as a short cut. But to reduce the size and put in a bridge?

The Pond Piazza is a monument to the unimaginative and mundane: grey and dull, Soviet-style and lacking in originality, vision: regrettably and monotonously short of colour – as if the designers told the town hall mandarins, twisting the words of Henry Ford: “You can have any colour you like, as longs as it is grey.”

But I am glad for the younger generation for all is not lost. You see I have this theory that every 15 years or so, some bod in the town hall looks out over The Pond and is bored by the view. “We ought to do something about this,” he or she suggests, and they rip it up and come up with a replacement.

So one day they will rip up the slabs and people will say to each other as they watch the bulldozers at work: “Whatever were they thinking of in the early 2000’s when they came up with this?”

I would like to look at the employment records in the town hall, because that person who keeps suggesting changing The Pond area, commenced employment at the end of the 1960s, at the very earliest.

You see, they did not change a thing from the 1930s through to the early 70s. It stayed quaintly the same for almost 40 years, but then the planners, having ruined Watford with the central redevelopment, felt there was one more vista left to spoil.

Mentally, I had gone to sleep by the time I left that area: it was that boring and so forgettable, it was not until my wife reminded me the other week that I remembered to put pen to paper.