LET’S take a walk up Sauchiehall Street. We’re starting at the bottom of the famous Glasgow street and heading west. There’s where the Ann Summers shop used to be and across the road is where BHS was; the building is looking pretty sad now, the windows dark and empty and the doorway full of dirt and graffiti. There’s also an empty shop unit on the other side of the street – Greaves sports was in there until earlier this year. It’s shut too. So much of this street is shut.

Let’s go a bit further up, past the man feeding the pigeons and the busker doing T Rex covers, and on towards the takeaways and the pubs. There’s every kind of food outlet here but it’s only at 2am that they really come alive. On one wall, high above the street, is an advert for one of this week’s special offers: “Jelly Belly Shots, 7 flavours, £1 each.” It’s all you can eat here, and all you can drink too.

And another thing: you can’t help noticing the state of it all: the manky bins crowded round every junction, the state of the pavements – cracked, pitched, stained – and the peeling fronts of the buildings, the litter, the fag butts. There’s also an extraordinary number of empty shops – 14 alone in the two pedestrianised blocks and another six between there and Charing Cross. Some are boarded up; some have to-let signs above the doors, and the impression is not good. In the last few days, I’ve been speaking to lots of people who know this street well and they’ve used all kinds of words to describe it: cruddy, sad, cheap, seedy, tatty. Not exactly the slogans you could put on the tourist posters.

If all of this sounds a bit disloyal to the grand old street of Glasgow, there is some good news. This summer, work will begin on a £115million improvement scheme between Charing Cross and Rose Street and the plans look good. The pavements will be widened. Trees will be planted. The tacky, uneven concrete will be replaced by Caithness stone and there will be bike lanes and street seating. As part of a wider plan, there is also an idea to cover part of the M8 in front of the Mitchell Library with a park along the lines of the High Line in New York. It’s ambitious and potentially transformative, but will it work?

To try to find out, I’ve been going up and down the street talking to some of the people who have an interest in the plan and first off, I’d like a diagnosis of the specific problems. Everyone brings up the physical state of the street, but there are plenty of other issues: the shift from high street shopping to online retail, business costs, the number of licences for bars and clubs on the street, the prevalence of begging and rough sleeping and the fact that Sauchiehall Street might, quite simply, be in the wrong place for modern Glaswegians going about their business.

I’m starting in Lauder’s, the lively old pub that sits on the crossroads with Renfield Street, where Steve McDonald, who runs the place, tells it like it is. “They called Sauchiehall Street part of the style mile,” he says, gesturing outside. “But I don’t see anything stylish about it. With BHS shutting, there is less footfall and no real reason to come on to Sauchiehall Street when you have Buchanan Galleries along the road. There are older people who still go to Marks and Spencer – if that closed, God knows what would happen to Sauchiehall Street.”

McDonald says the atmosphere on parts of the street is also a problem. “If I was a woman on my own, I wouldn’t walk up the street at night,” he says. And he identifies rough sleepers as an issue. “They are lying there sleeping all day and it’s looking a bit seedy,” he says. “Give them some help. Why are they sleeping rough?”

Further up the street, Ailsa Nazir, the manager of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, agrees with McDonald that the street has seen better days – “it’s become a really sad-looking street,” she says – but she sees things slightly differently on the issue of pubs and what she calls the cheap, boozy bars. “Maybe the council has allowed too many of those to be licensed at the same time and I don’t know many people who would choose to be on Sauchiehall Street from two in the morning,” she says. “A lot is responsibly managed but for us it sometimes feels like we are a little island on the street. Sauchiehall Street shouldn’t be allowed to become a street that’s just full of late-night bars.”

Stuart Patrick, the chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, is another one who agrees on the state of the street – “cruddy” is his verdict – but he has his eyes on another problem which he thinks may explain some of those empty shop units and to-let signs: the cost of setting up and running a business. “City centre rates appear to have gone up faster than outside the city centre,” he says. “And the assessor will say to you, ‘rents have gone up because there is a huge amount of demand and that’s reflecting how the market has moved’ so rents go up, rates go up. However, that’s not so much what’s happening in the out-of-town shopping centres and the worry is you are providing a disincentive, particularly for independents, to be in the city centre.”

Patrick hopes the Barclay Review of Business Rates, which is due to report in the summer, will provide some relief, particularly for the hospitality sector. But there is another problem for Sauchiehall Street which it may be much harder to solve – could it be in the wrong place?

Leigh Sparks, professor of retail studies at Stirling University, believes so. Spending on clothing has become much less important on the high street, he says, with food and drink more important, and with food and drink, the emphasis is on convenience. In other words, people like to shop for their food on the way home through rail or bus stations and many of the retailers have followed the action, leaving Sauchiehall Street out of the loop now that the shops on the street aren’t the draw they once were.

“In one sense,” says Professor Sparks, “the centre of Glasgow has shifted so that means the traditional function of Sauchiehall Street doesn’t play in the way it used to play. Why would you spend lots of time there? What’s the draw?”

Taken together, there are a lot of problems, some obvious when you walk down the street, others less so, but the great hope is that the regeneration this summer will start to solve them. One of the people I speak to is Brian Fulton, director of CPL Entertainment, which owns The Garage music venue on Sauchiehall Street, and he believes improving the look and feel of the street will be the beginning of a change. He and other businesses, he says, want a brighter, greener and cleaner space.

However, Fulton recognises that sprucing up the street is not the full answer and believes that the Finnieston area just down the road could offer a useful model. Finnieston used to be a bit like Sauchiehall Street: shabby, struggling, with cheap shops and dodgy pubs, but ever since the opening of the Hydro music venue in 2013, the area has filled up with nice restaurants and bars and most days it’s busy and buzzing.

Fulton believes the beginnings of a similar hub already exist in Sauchiehall Street. “You have a lot of cultural assets around Sauchiehall Street,” he says, “The art school, the conservatoire, the theatres at either end, the CCA. It’s about creating a magnet to bring people in.”

It’s something Professor Sparks agrees with. “The CCA is interesting,” he says. “What could you build around that?”

But what about the problem that a few people have mentioned: the late-night drunken atmosphere around the bottom end of the main stretch of Sauchiehall Street? It’s all very well making the area lovely, but if folk are a bit scared to go there at night, isn’t that defeating the purpose?

Fulton believes it is a lot better than it was 10 to 15 years ago. “You have the marshals who police the area, the stewards who are all linked up with radio, and you have the city watch cameras,” he says. “It’s a much safer place now and it doesn’t suit any of us if people are coming in and fighting.”

Stuart Patrick also believes the solution is about more than just people coming into the street for a night-out, it’s about attracting people to come and live on Sauchiehall Street again in greater numbers. The student accommodation proposed for near the Glasgow School of Art may have been turned down, but everyone seems to agree that more students and others living on Sauchiehall Street could be an important part of its regeneration. Specifically, Patrick believes that there was too great a focus in the past on attracting offices and retail and that more residential would be good thing. “Glasgow city centre has about half the population that you would expect it to have compared to Birmingham and Manchester,” he says. “But I think that’s changing.”

Living or working on the street is not the complete solution however – what Sauchiehall Street wants is the linger factor: as Professor Sparks puts it, what draws you there and then keeps you there? Part of the answer could be trying to attract brands back to the street, which is something publican Steve McDonald of Lauder’s would like to see. “I think they have to reduce the rates and get some big companies back in,” he says. “They’re expanding Buchanan Galleries – why not bring one of the big stores here?”

But, with the drift towards internet shopping that everyone mentions, can that really be the solution? Buchanan Street may still be thriving and full of big brands, but is there enough to go all the way along Sauchiehall Street as well? Leigh Sparks and Ailsa Nazir of the CCA think not and believe that the answer is not to try to create another high street, but to create an alternative, something distinctive and unusual that will attract people for its own sake.

“We are really keen that Sauchiehall Street doesn’t turn into another high street that you can see anywhere with supermarket branches and all your regular shops that you can get further down into the city centre – you don’t need more of that on Sauchiehall Street,” says Nazir. “We like the regeneration that has happened in Finnieston where there’s lots of individual restaurants and bars and shops that are unique and individual – we think if that model could be applied in Sauchiehall Street, that would be a really interesting way to bring people in during the day.”

Nazir believes one way to bring this about would be to use the vacant units more creatively – encourage local artists to exhibit there for example – or allow pop-up shops, but she says the council would have to let that happen without charging huge rates. She also likes the idea of creating an arts hub around which the new street could thrive.

“On Sauchiehall Street there’s a real argument that we are so central to lots of different higher education places that it could be a real arts and cultural hub," says Nazir. "Once the street became more of a vibrant arts and cultural place, then automatically other people would want to move into other vacant units.”

Nazir is also confident that the regeneration plans for the street will help – the new seating, the trees and hopefully less traffic. She, like everyone else, recognises it is only a start, but a start is better than nothing and everyone I speak to believes improving the environment will be positive. Whether it will work is another matter, but the first, obvious, necessary step is to give Glasgow’s most famous street just a little of what it has deserved for a long time: love and attention.

• Work is due to start on the Sauchiehall Street regeneration between Charing Cross and Rose Street on July 31.

• The project will involve reducing the two lanes of traffic to one; parking will also be moved off the streets to the side streets.

• A cycle lane will be added and trees will be planted with a view to providing some shelter on rainy days. Street furniture, new street lights and bike stands will also be added.

• As part of the effort to make the street look more attractive, the pavements will be widened to allow more space for tables and chairs outside bars and restaurants.

• The work is expected to take about 18 months.