By the late Anglo-Saxon period Bedminster was a manor held by King Edward the Confessor in the 11th century, and in the Domesday Book of 1086 was still in royal hands.

[5] When John Wesley preached there in the 1760s, it was a sprawling, decayed market town, with orchards next to brickworks, ropewalks and the beginnings of a mining industry.

Open cast coal mining had been done on a small scale since the 1670s, but in 1748 the first shafts were sunk by Sir Jarrit Smyth at South Liberty Lane.

The population of Bedminster increased rapidly, from 3,000 in 1801 to 78,000 in 1884, mostly as a result of the coalfield and industries such as smelting, tanneries, glue-works, paint and glass factories.

Victoria Park was laid out at the north of Bedminster in the late 1880s to provide recreational facilities for the new housing development.

Post-war town planning relocated most of the heavy industry to the rural areas to the south of the parish, and new estates grew up in Withywood, Hartcliffe and Highridge.

These chapelries subsequently became separate civil parishes, and were transferred from Somerset to Bristol when it was made a county corporate in 1373.

[11][12] Having lost Abbots Leigh and ceded the three former chapelries in the Redcliffe area to Bristol in the Middle Ages, the boundaries of the civil parish then remained essentially unchanged, and entirely in Somerset, until the nineteenth century.

In 1803 the Act of Parliament authorising the construction of the New Cut of the River Avon transferred the northern strip of Bedminster parish, as lay between the old course of the river and the proposed New Cut, from Somerset into the city and county of Bristol, but left the parish boundary unaffected.

[13] In 1836 a further area lying south of the New Cut, including the village (as it was then described) of Bedminster itself, was also brought within Bristol's city boundaries.

Bedminster is home to many sports teams, including Broad Plain Rugby Club, who play in the Bristol Combination league, and Bedminster Cricket Club, which was founded in 1847 and has historical links with W. G. Grace, who play in the West of England Premier League.

[20] A greyhound racing track called the Magnet Racecourse was opened on 9 June 1928, on South Liberty Lane, Long Ashton.

The northern part of Ashton Vale, adjacent to the Portishead Railway line, is mixed light industrial and retail outlets.

[23] Bedminster is part of the Bristol South constituency, whose MP is Karin Smyth of the Labour Party since 2015.