It lay southeast of the village of Kensington, abutting the parish of St Margaret's, Westminster at the hamlet of Knightsbridge to the northeast, with Little Chelsea to the south.

Today the village has been comprehensively eclipsed by segmentation due principally to railway development culminating in London Underground lines,[3] and its imposition of station names, including Knightsbridge, South Kensington and Gloucester Road as the names of stops during accelerated urbanisation, but lacking any cogent reference to local history and usage or distinctions from neighbouring settlements.

[6] Its name survives formally to this day, only just, in the shared reference to two of the council's electoral wards called, "Brompton" and "Hans Town".

The name 'Brompton', now used loosely, then applied most precisely to the settlement which lay westwards of what is now South Kensington Station, just off the turnpike road along the lane to Earl's Court.

"[9]Brompton's northern neighbours were the hamlets of Kensington Gore, dated but not dead in use, and Knight's bridge, a crossing over the culverted river Westbourne.

As to its old eastern half its administration remains in the City of Westminster, again due to the tube network it is commonly marked on maps as part of "Knightsbridge" district.

According to the Church of England this has been simplified so that a three-church parish Holy Trinity Brompton – St Paul's, Onslow Square and St Augustine's, Queen's Gate takes up a 1⁄8 SW to WSW radial sector focused on what was for many centuries a geographical point, a bridge, "Knights Bridge (Knightsbridge)", from which Brompton was always narrowly omitted.

Boundaries can be traced in the street network with a few small gaps, clockwise from the north: West Brompton became overshadowed by Earls Court which overtook its land, but it extended more broadly than is suggested by the above sectors, to have a long border along the hidden Counter's Creek, (today's West London line), with the Hammersmith and Fulham borough boundary, then back along the Cromwell Road/Queen's Gate through Gloucester Road.

[12] It was a rural area which subsequently attracted attention as the story of developments centred along a turnpike road that ran south westward from London through Knightsbridge Green and horticultural Brompton to Little Chelsea and the ancient parish of Fulham on the banks of the Thames and thence over Putney Bridge onto the County of Surrey.

[16] The gradual fragmentation and overshadowing of Brompton was probably due to two factors: the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the rapid institutional developments in the area, such as museums and colleges; and the arrival of railway transport.