Atomic gas in the central kiloparsec of young radio galaxies is quite prevalent, as revealed by 21cm H I absorption line observations using the WSRT. The column depths are anti-correlated with the linear sizes of the radio sources, but VLBI reveals that sometimes the neutral hydrogen is situated in a disk or torus on parsec or sub-kiloparsec scales around the central engine, while in other cases the H I is probably associated with star-forming regions along the jets. NGC 1052 is a nearby example, in which, next to some isolated clouds along the jets, there appears to be an atomic and molecular torus with a radius of a few parsecs, but with a central hole of about 0.5 pc, in which the gas is mostly ionised.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html