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Activists declared Donald Trump a “racist bigot’ as they descended on the US embassy in London to urge Theresa May to cancel her meeting with him next week.

The anti-Trump protesters braved the wet weather to stage the demonstration on the first anniversary of Mr Trump's inauguration as US president, pushing over a mock wall they had built in front of the embassy's recently opened site in Vauxhall.

It came a week after Mr Trump publicly cancelled a visit to Britain to open the new site because, he said, it had been sold for "peanuts" and was built in an "off location" of London.

Mr Trump wrote on Twitter at the time: "Bad deal. [They] Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!"

Prime Minister Theresa May is due to meet with him at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week.

Around 20 activists from the campaign group Stand up to Racism chanted: "Donald Trump go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay", and "from Calais to Mexico, all the walls have got to go".

They fumed at Mr Trump's recent controversial remarks on immigration, when he was reported to have branded Haiti and some African states "s***hole" countries in a White House meeting.

Lewis Nielsen led much of the crowd's chanting, and later said that Mr Trump will be "met by the biggest demonstration in British history" if he comes to the UK.

The 24-year-old said: "Today marks a year since Trump came to office.

"In that year, he's proved himself to be a racist, sexist bigot. He's tried to bring in a Muslim ban, he's called the whole of Africa a s***hole, he wants to build a wall in Mexico. It's incredibly important we oppose his racism.

"If a state visit is arranged it will be a huge mistake for the Government, because the city and the country would be shut down by some of the biggest protests."

Michael Bradley, 50, who works for Stand up to Racism, said: "The man's completely unacceptable and it's pushing politics beyond what is acceptable.

“We think he's a racist and we think the reason he didn't come to Britain is he knows there would have been millions of people out on the streets.

"If he came to Britain, it would be absolutely unimaginable, the level of protest at every level of British society."

The demonstration came on the same day that the US government plunged into a shutdown after the Senate could not agree on a new budget.

Affecting hundreds of thousands of federal workers, the shutdown is the first in US history to occur while the same party – the Republicans – controls both Congress and the White House.

Additional reporting by Press Association