Herbert Read began his career working for the noted Exeter woodcarver Harry Hems, rising to the position of foreman joiner or chief designer, before leaving to set up his own business, St Sidwell’s Artworks, in 1888. The second Herbert Read took over from his father in 1908 and carried on the business until his death in 1950, when he was succeeded by his son, Herbert (Dick) Read. After Dick Read's untimely death in an accident in 1972, and, the company was re-named Herbert Read Ltd in honour of his father.
The company specialized in ecclesiastical woodcarving, though they also accepted commissions for private houses and other buildings. Until the demise of the Harry Hems company in the 1930s, the two firms had almost equal shares in woodcarving work, Herbert Read undertaking slightly more restoration than new work. Thereafter, the Read company took the lion’s share of such work in Devon, both restoration and new.
The workshop of St Sidwell’s Artworks was in Sidwell Street in Exeter and was destroyed in the Exeter Blitz in May 1942. Although a large quantity of correspondence and other records was lost, the drawings were kept elsewhere and were later discovered and moved to safety. Their survival preserves an important link in the record of ecclesiastical building and furnishing in Devon, encompassing as it does the period of late Victorian church construction and restoration as well as 20th-century re-ordering and conservation projects. They complement the records of faculty jurisdiction deposited at the Devon Heritage Centre by the Diocese of Exeter, as well as representing the work of an important local industry. In the later 20th century the company won contracts for many prestigious new projects, including the Cathedral in Washington DC and St Thomas’s, Fifth Avenue, and the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, and also carried out much important restoration work, including conservation and repair of the Grinling Gibbons carvings at Hampton court, following the fire there in 1992.
The Devon Heritage Centre had the opportunity in 2006 to purchase these records, and this was achieved with generous assistance from the Friends of Devon's Archives, the V&A Grant Purchase Fund, the Friends of the National Libraries, and descendants of the Read family. They are now safely stored at Great Moor House, where they await detailed listing and conservation.