I have recently bumped onto a comment by a guy who had to fly over London for assignment and he said the strictness of the rules surprised him a bit.
So I decided to see how does a restricted zone look like and what are the restrictions. It's quite logical that the air space is heavily regulated, but I also know that there are TV crews, helicopter tours and aerial photographers flying around every day – I think that last year London had over 16,000 helicopter flights. I found this document:
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/7/EIS%2006.pdf
Can someone explain the map – is everything in the delimited pink area a restricted zone? What are then these subzones, zones within zones and that one zone that goes further bit to the east over Thames? What do the triangles, circles and dots represent?