[3] Carey explained the song's inspiration – a shoemaker's apprentice taking his sweetheart on a tour of London's sights which finished with "proceeding to the Farthing Pye-house, he gave her a Collation of Buns, Cheesecakes, Gammon of Bacon, Stuff’d-beef, and Bottled-ale;"[4][5] Defoe's 1722 novel Colonel Jack also alludes to the tavern, when young Jack crosses London into a large field named after it.

[6] The most famous landlord in this period was Mr Price, who was known for his skill in making music by beating a salt-box with a rolling pin, accompanying musicians such as Carl Friedrich Abel, who played the violoncello.

The tavern appears on Rocque's map of 1746 on the corner of the Green Lane with the East-West track which was later to become the New Road.

The area was described in the recollections of John Thomas Smith:[10]I should have noticed Kendall’s farm which in 1746 belonged to a farmer of the name of Bilson, a pretty large one, where I have seen eight or ten immense hay-ricks all on a row; it stood on the site of the commencement of the present Osnaburg Street, nearly opposite the Green Man, originally called the Farthing Pie House....It commanded views of the old Queen's Head and Artichoke, the old Jew’s Harp House, and the distant hills of Highgate, Hampstead, Primrose, and Harrow.

I was then in my eighth year, and frequently played at trap-ball between the above-mentioned sombre elms....when the sites of Portland Place, Devonshire Street, etc., were fields, the famous Tommy Lowe, then a singer at Mary-le-bone Gardens, raised a subscription, to enable an unfortunate man to run a small chariot, drawn by four muzzled mastiffs, from a pond near Portland Chapel, called Cockney Ladle, which supplied Mary-le-bone Bason with water, to the Farthing Pie House in order to accommodate children with a ride for a halfpenny.The radical MP John Wilkes campaigned there for election to the Middlesex constituency as the suffrage was limited to wealthy freeholders who could be found there.