Over the years, several books featuring shipping on the River Humber have been published, but few have viewed their subject from an inland waterway viewpoint. This book, together with its companion volume Shipping on the Humber - The South Bank, attempts to fill that gap, though sea-going traffic has not been ignored.

Wooden sailing keels and sloops, characteristic of the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the steel motor barges that came along later, are featured in the illustrations, together with the shipyards where many of them were built and maintained.

Maps and photographs of inland waterway craft at work on the docks, havens, rivers and canals of the Humber's north bank have been selected from locations including Driffield, Beverley, Brough, Hessle, Hedon, Newport and, of course, Hull.