Clifton was recorded in the Domesday book as Clistone, the name of the village denoting a 'hillside settlement' and referring to its position on a steep hill.

It has road links to the city centre and outer western suburbs, and across the Clifton Suspension Bridge to Leigh Woods in North Somerset.

The ward is represented by two members on Bristol City Council, which as of 2024[update] are Paula O'Rourke and Jerome Thomas, both of the Green Party of England and Wales.

In Frances Burney's novel Evelina (1778), young gentlemen are racing their phaetons on the public highways of Clifton (then still outside Bristol), and not without incident.

In some passages characters debate whether Clifton could ever become viable and whether investment in real estate there would not be too risky – questions which were evidently quite relevant at the time though to the modern reader the answers are obvious.

The plot revolved around a family moving into an old house; and subsequently finding a skeleton of a long-dead person in a hidden room.

The plot is based on the story of the real-life Thomas Brereton, a Dragoon commander who committed suicide after being court-martialled for his lenient approach to suppressing the rioters; although the ghost is named "George Bretherton" in the TV series.

Clifton has been featured in many television sitcoms, including the late 1970s and early 1980s TV series Shoestring, which was set in Bristol and starred Trevor Eve as a radio reporter and part-time sleuth.

Costume drama The House of Eliott was also largely filmed in Clifton, including at Goldney Hall and Berkeley Square.

[38] In a 2017 episode of the American historical adventure television series Black Sails, Blackbeard played by Ray Stevenson mentions Clifton as being the home of his mother.

[40] Cliftonwood is a small suburb Bristol, bounded approximately by the Hotwells Road to the south, Jacob's Wells Road and Constitution Hill to the East and North East, Clifton Vale to the West, and by the gardens of Goldney Hall, a University of Bristol hall of residence, to the north.

A medieval Jewish ritual bath known as a mikveh was discovered in 1987 in the former Hotwells Police Station bicycle shed by the Temple Local History group.