Condition of poor labourers in london: . Factory or workshop owners did not house the migrant workers; instead, individual landowners put up cheap and unsafe tenements for the workers. . A study shows that about one million Londoners were very poor and were expected to live upto an average age of 29. These people were more than likely to die in a workhouse, hospital or lunatic asylum. . Better-off city dwellers demanded that slums be cleared away.