Wedgwood Edme Square Handled Cake Plate, 1958 Queen's Ware

The Piece

One of the quiet masterpieces of English tableware design: Wedgwood's Edme, in the square handled cake plate form. The warm ivory earthenware rises from a plain square well into a rim of fine radiating ribs — a fluting Wedgwood likened to the ridges of a clamshell, a nod to Josiah Wedgwood's own shell collecting — finished at the corners with subtly modeled braided handles. No printed pattern, no gilt, no color: the entire design is light and shadow moving across the ribs.

The reverse carries the printed Wedgwood Edme cartouche with "Made in England," alongside impressed factory marks pressed into the clay — the double-marking of Wedgwood's own production, from the pottery that has anchored English ceramics since 1759.

History

Edme debuted in 1908 and stayed in production for over a century — until 2014 — which tells you everything about the design. Wedgwood created it in the fashionable neoclassical revival taste, executed in the firm's signature cream earthenware: Queen's Ware, the refined creamware body that made Josiah Wedgwood's name when Queen Charlotte endorsed it in the 1760s. Edme became the shape's twentieth-century flagship — beloved on both sides of the Atlantic, collected by generations who wanted English pedigree without formality.

A century of production means Edme pieces span eras — but this plate tells you its year outright. Wedgwood impressed date codes into its earthenware, and the code in this clay reads 1958: pressed, fired, and glazed in Staffordshire the year the transatlantic jet age began. Few makers documented themselves so precisely; it is one of the quiet pleasures of collecting Wedgwood.

Product Details

Why It Belongs In Your Home

Edme is the piece designers reach for when a table needs texture without noise. The ribbed square catches candlelight beautifully under a cake, a cheese course, or a pyramid of clementines — and empty, it's sculpture: prop it on a plate rack or lean it at the back of open shelving and the fluting does the rest. It bridges styles effortlessly, sitting as comfortably beside the Flow Blue and ironstone as under a modern ceramic teapot. A century-long production run is the market's way of saying a design never put a foot wrong. This is that design.