To understand Norwich you have to understand Roanoke in 1890. After the Norfolk and Western Railway located its headquarters in the small town of Big Lick in 1882, the population exploded. By 1890 the place had earned the nickname The Magic City. Land speculation was everywhere. In October of that year, the Roanoke Development Company was chartered with $1.1 million in capital - $500,000 to buy land, the rest to lure industry to it. The company bought 1,300 acres southwest of the city and platted the Turkey Bottom area by the end of 1891. Bridges, roads, streetcar service. Industry came: the Norwich Lock Company built a factory and, in the practice of the era, built housing for its workers right next to it. Then the Panic of 1893 swallowed the venture. The Roanoke Development Company closed after only two years. But the neighborhood, named for the lock factory, stayed.

Norwich sat in a bowl of low ground bordered by the Roanoke River to the north and a pronounced ridge to the south. That isolation made it cohesive and forgotten in equal measure. In its early years, Norwich was technically part of Roanoke County - but the county considered it Roanoke City's problem, and the city considered it the county's. Norwichians, one local historian wrote, were disowned and neglected by both. The Norwich Lock building passed to the Roanoke Cotton Mill Company in 1899, which continued building employee housing. The workers at the cotton mill included children. Many of the subjects photographed there by Lewis Hine were barefoot, working with dangerous equipment, and claiming to be fourteen despite often looking much younger. The mill changed hands again in 1910, and the site was eventually razed in the mid-20th century.

Another industrial mainstay outlasted the cotton mill by a century. The Walker Machine and Foundry Corporation built its Norwich factory in 1920 and ran it almost to 2020. Its closure became a small civic drama. Roanoke City wanted to extend its Roanoke River greenway through the district and needed a 30-foot strip at the edge of the Walker property. The foundry argued that giving up the land would cost them an air-quality permit they held only through a grandfather clause. Lawsuits followed. The Walker foundry closed in 2019, and the company alleged that the city's threat of eminent domain had caused the closure. The two parties settled in 2020. Walker got $750,000 and a railroad spur. The city got nearly five acres of property and, eventually, its greenway bridge across the river - the Bridge the Gap, opened in 2023, connecting Roanoke to Salem along the river the workers' children once played beside.

The 2024 National Register listing counted 116 contributing resources in Norwich, including two sites and one structure. Only 21 homes in the district were built after 1920 - the rest are the original mill worker housing, densely packed and architecturally near-identical, with the consistent setbacks and rhythms that come from being built fast and cheap in a single short window. That sameness, which once might have been read as monotony, now reads as history preserved. Workers' housing was the first thing demolished when mill towns redeveloped. Most cities cleared theirs decades ago in the name of urban renewal. Norwich survived partly because its bowl of land was too obscure to be worth clearing, partly because the people who lived there refused to leave. The district endures as a rare, dense remnant of what 19th-century industrial labor actually looked like at home.