Essington is a heritage-listed former gentleman's residence and farm estate and now independent school located at 2, 4, 6, and 8 Bridge Road, Westmead in the Cumberland Council local government area of New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1860 to 1890. It is also known as Essington Christian Centre; Westmead Christian Grammar School. The property is owned by Church of the Foursquare Gospel. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. History Essington was built for one of Holroyd's important pioneers, William Fullagar as his second, residence, opposite his first, (The Wattles or Wattle Cottage) as a gentleman's villa on the northern side of the Great Western Highway in a prominent position. Reportedly it was designed and decorated with no expense spared. Fullagar was the son of convicts John Fulligar and Esther Leadham, and he demonstrates the upward mobility of descendants of many individuals transported to NSW. Fullagar was a butcher and publican turned stock agent who was in the process of buying large tracts of neighbouring properties and making his way up in the world. From his base at The Wattles or Wattle Cottage, he bought sufficient land to make him one of Holroyd's important pioneers whose estates covered much of Wentworthville. William Fullagar purchased the James grant, to the south of the present Essington, in 1849, and "soon after he purchased it, he fenced it and built his residence upon it and went there to live, and lived there continuously from that time until within a few years of his death". When he bought James's 30 acres, Fullagar was the lessee of the neighbouring Burder Park estate (later Finlayson's Estate) a property immediately west of James's grant belonging to descendants of Rowland Hassall, William Davis and John Bolger - these are all marked on a 1908 map of the Parish of St. John. He then purchased land from the Burder Park estate in 2 lots of in 1851 and 1854, the last section of on the south-west corner was not acquired until 1866. He used the property as part of his business for cattle grazing and in later years, agistment as well as growing hay and other feed crops, timber cutting, making bricks and cultivating part of it as an orchard. All statements agreed that once he moved to Willow Cottage, Fullagar never lived anywhere else until he built