It is located 9 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of the City of Canada Bay.

In the 1850s a Dr Fortescue owned an estate in this area which he named Chiswick after the village on the Thames, west of London.

Parramatta River had been known as the 'Thames of the Antipodes' and other nearby suburbs were also named after Thames localities, such as Greenwich, Woolwich, Henley and Putney.

The most common responses for ancestry in Chiswick were English 21.1%, Italian 17.4%, Australian 17.0%, Chinese 11.9% and Irish 10.0%.

Chiswick has a small group of shops in Blackwall Point Road, close to the ferry wharf.